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By day 3 of using OpenClaw, Dillon Loomis says he spent about $70 on Claude…

2026-02-01 · 17:48 UTC ·DillonLoomis ·3 min read

Brief

Dillon Loomis presents OpenClaw as simultaneously impressive and economically uncomfortable after three days of use. His central claim is that cloud-based agent workflows burn through tokens far faster than social media hype suggests: about $70 in Claude spend over a single day for relatively modest usage, which leads him to think a high-RAM Mac Studio for local inference may be the better long-term setup. At the same time, he says the product’s capabilities are real, describing a bot that can ingest feature ideas from bookmarked X posts and then carry out tasks like security checks, GitHub project creation, and Google Docs generation with minimal intervention. Loomis sees the strongest personal value in building a persistent health-history database and using the agent for proactive medical research. But he argues security fears—especially prompt injection and unknown attack surfaces—make it rational to keep these systems sandboxed, which sharply reduces short-term automation upside.

Why it matters

By day 3 of using OpenClaw, Dillon Loomis says he spent about $70 on Claude credits in roughly 24 hours for normal conversation, light tasks, and a few cron-job automations, mostly on Sonnet and Haiku rather than Opus.

Key details

  • Loomis argues that users who do not run models locally will face unsustainable costs, estimating that popular workflows like overnight automations, morning briefings, and project creation likely cost hundreds of dollars per week when powered via APIs.
  • He reports that OpenClaw can autonomously execute tasks from bookmarked X posts, including memory optimization, security checks, creating small projects, pushing code to GitHub, and generating Google Docs in Google Drive through separate bot accounts.
  • His main use case is health optimization: he wants persistent memory to maintain an exportable database of his health history and use the bot as an expert researcher to help diagnose, detect, and proactively monitor issues.
  • Loomis says strict security compartmentalization is limiting the system’s usefulness because he has denied it access to email, files, and personal accounts due to prompt-injection risk and unknown attack vectors, leading him to frame OpenClaw as a multi-year learning project rather than a near-term automation windfall.
Source evidence

title: @DillonLoomis: Some uncomfortable, no hype realizations on day 3 of OpenClaw: • If you don't ru...
author: DillonLoomis
contenttype: twitterpost
published: 2026-02-01T17:48:01+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/DillonLoomis/status/2018018516373221377

word_count: 574

Tweet by @DillonLoomis

Some uncomfortable, no hype realizations on day 3 of OpenClaw: • If you don't run models locally, you will indeed burn through tokens. Just for normal conversation, some light tasks and a few simple cron jobs (automations), I've spent $70 on Claude credits in ~24 hours. Certainly not sustainable for my use cases right now. Most of my back and forth wasn't even using Opus, it was Sonnet/Haiku. I'm starting to think a Mac Studio with extra RAM is the superior long term play so you can avoid API tokens as much as possible. But just know, all the posts about these overnight automations and morning briefings and project creation are likely costing hundreds of dollars a week if the models aren't local • The coolest thing so far has been going through my OpenClaw bookmarks folder of X posts with features and add ons and just feeding each post to my Bot. So whether it's memory optimization or checking for security vulnerabilities or creating small projects and pushing to GitHub, whatever I've told it to do, it just does it on its own. It really is wild. The capabilities are real, but if you don't have specific use cases for your life, you should think about exactly what you'd want automated before jumping in • I created all new accounts for my Bot, and watching it create Google Docs in Google Drive on its own is really cool. My primary focus right now is on health optimization and taking advantage of the permanent memory to have one database with all of my health history that can quickly be exported and to have an expert researcher to diagnose, detect and stay proactive. This alone was always going to be worth the financial and time investment for me and so far, it's exactly what I was hoping for and more • The firewall and separate accounts I've created is part of the problem. I've been overly concerned about security issues so I haven't given it any access to my emails or files or anything personal. I might in the future but the prompt injection risk and unkown attack vectors seem like too much of a risk for me, I have too much to lose. For now, this is going to limit a lot of the potential benefits and automation, but I'm just not ready to take on the risk and there is plenty for me to learn/explore and build before crossing that chasm • For me this entire endeavor was always going to be a multi-year project. I was never expecting to be retired on a beach in a few weeks. I just wanted to start learning this world more intimately and to be ready as things advance from here. But I know a lot of people will dive into this wanting big automations in the short term and I think many in that group will end up disappointed. This is very clearly the future, but if you're not willing to give it access to your actual life and accounts, the early benefits may be limited relative to your expectations going on • It really is addicting. The self-correction is impressive, anytime there's a limitation or problem, it just figures it out with minimal input from me. There is so much potential with this and it's only the beginning, but the token burn and accessibility concerns should be emphasized more than they are right now

Posted: 2026-02-01T17:48:01.000Z
Engagement: 933 likes, 50 retweets, 116 replies