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by Alifatisk·4mo ago·view on hn ↗
Skimming through the comments, it feels like I am reading the same message over and over. I agree with some comments that are pointing out the issue with Anthropics capacity constraints and when Subscription vs Api is appropriate.

I would like to point out something else. I have Z.ai subscription and they have a dashboard on my usage.

When trying out Openclaw a while ago, I noted something worrying. Its constantly consuming tokens, every single hour during the day, it consumed tokens. I could see over a period of 30 days, token usage would climb and climb and climb and then shrink to bottom again, as if Openclaw did a context window compaction.

Note, this usage was happening even though I wasn’t using it. It were always running and doing something in the background.

I believe its their Heartbeat.md mechanism. By default it’s set to run every half an hour. I changed it to twice a day, that was enough to me.

I can imagine if thousands of users where connecting their Openclaw instance with default config to Claude with the latest and greatest Opus model, that must’ve felt a bit.

1 comments
Yeah, its heartbeat. If you keep HEARTBEAT.md empty, it won't be consuming tokens every half an hour. Use cron for periodic tasks if possible, but if you need LLM to process something periodically, that's what heartbeat is for. Z burned 166mio tokens in last 30 days, majority was the heartbeat. Definitely wouldn't pay for that if it wouldn't be the subscription. It uses 1-4% of every 5h quotas. Definitely not sustainable, but I take the opportunity to learn things while it lasts.
Have you tried switching to smaller models like GLM-4.5-air for Openclaw? I’m thinking you’d consume way less of the hourly quota. Often times, the smaller models are decent enough when the task is not complex.
Not really my problem. I'm far from running out of quotas at any given time. I don't use z.ai subscription much for anything else, except Openclaw. I'll upgrade to GLM5 once they'll give me to the lite plan. I'll keep heartbeat at 4.7, just because it's powerfull enough for my current needs, and also I don't want to put more stress on the infrastructure than needed.
> I'll keep heartbeat at 4.7, just because it's powerfull enough for my current needs, and also I don't want to put more stress on the infrastructure than needed.

Woah, that’s thoughtful of you. Glad to see someone else having the same mindset.