OpenClaw has gone viral and for good reasons. It makes AI into your personal assistant, an employee that works 24/7. The bad new is you can go through your Claude limits in such a short time. If you are using the API directly, you will rack up a giant bill unless you optimize your OpenClaw. Using multiple models is one way to do so. You can also rely on DeepSeek, which is super cheap.
For starters, you are going to need an old computer or a cheap VPS service, like Hetzner, to get started. Once you are there, run the following command “curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash” and choose your provider. If you go with OpenRouter, you will be able to use various models without entering too many credentials. Not all models are supported, so if you are not going with OpenRouter, you will have to use something like DeepSeek Integration for OpenClaw.
You will need to add the following to your openclaw.json file to get started:
You can verify whether DeekSeek is installed by running the following command:
openclaw models list | grep deepseek
