The creator of OpenClaw reveals his colossal bill at OpenAI: coding with AI, is it really profitable?

Discussions around 'vibe coding' (letting an AI write the code on its own) generally revolve around promises of efficiency and productivity gains.1,305,088.81 dollars billed over 30 days. Steinberger is the creator of OpenClaw, the open-source coding agent that has accumulated over 302,000 stars on GitHub in a few months. The project is one of the fastest to reach this threshold in the platform's history. Since February 2026, it has also been working at OpenAI.

The latest CodexBar update makes API costs wayyyy nicer. https://t.co/lJ4dxNHwzG pic.twitter.com/fCkWutJGzT

— Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) May 15, 2026

603 billion tokens for three developers

The total corresponds to running approximately 100 Codex instances in parallel, powered by the GPT-5 model (dated April 23, 2026). Over this period, these agents consumed 603 billion tokens through 7.6 million requests. All operated by a team of three people. Per agent, the average cost reached approximately $13,000 per month, which is an order of magnitude far from OpenAI's official estimate for Codex (between $100 and $200 per developer and per month).

Steinberger clarified that disabling the « Fast Mode » would reduce the bill by about 80%, bringing it down to around $300,000. An amount that remains considerable for three people. On the day of the post, his dashboard showed $19,985 in consumption and 206,000 requests over the last 24 hours.

The detail that sheds light on the whole situation: this bill is fully covered by OpenAI. Steinberger, hired in February 2026, benefits from unlimited API access as part of what OpenAI considers research investment. Without this support, OpenClaw in its current form would simply not exist at this scale.

What the invoice says about the market

For developers who use AI coding tools daily, the comparison is clear. A GitHub Copilot Business subscription costs $19 per month. Claude Max from Anthropic is priced at €200. ChatGPT Pro, repositioned in April 2026 for the developer segment, increased from €103 to €229. Even at the highest rate, none of these subscriptions represent even 2% of what the Steinberger OpenClaw trio consumes in a single month.

The incident also highlights the recent history of the project. In April 2026, Anthropic had excluded OpenClaw from its Claude Pro and Max subscriptions, estimating that the token volume generated by the tool far exceeded the intended usage of their plans. A few weeks later, it was OpenAI that warmly welcomed Steinberger (and his consumption). The difference between the two approaches lies in a single figure: $1.3 million per month, absorbed as research cost by one, deemed unsustainable by the other.

The promise of vibe coding rests on the idea that AI agents will eventually cost less than a human developer. At $13,000 per agent and per month, we are not there yet.

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