Your OpenClaw bot handles email, meetings, and CRM updates. The brain behind it costs anywhere from $7 to $585 a month. This guide helps you pick the right one.
The Expensive Default
Every OpenClaw setup guide says the same thing: connect WhatsApp, install some skills, pick a paid model for the brain.
Nobody mentions what that costs.
Your bot checks email, updates your CRM, and rearranges your calendar about 200 times a day. One task every 7 minutes during business hours. At standard rates, that’s $86/month on GPT. $585/month on Claude Opus.
Five open source models do the same work for $7 to $19/month. Same tasks. Comparable quality. The difference isn’t a rounding error. It’s a car payment.
What Actually Matters When Choosing
Forget benchmarks and parameter counts. Four things decide whether a model works for your bot.
Can it take actions? Your bot books meetings, sends emails, updates your CRM. The model needs to do all of that without making things up.
Can it chain steps together? “Read this email, decide if it’s urgent, draft a reply, log it to the CRM.” That’s four decisions. Weak models break at step two.
Can it follow instructions? Your bot juggles personality, skills, rules, and conversation at once. The model can’t drift halfway through.
Who sees your data? Cloud providers read your emails and CRM data. Local models keep everything on your machine.
The Five Worth Knowing
Qwen 3.5 (Best Value)
Alibaba released this February 16, 2026. It speaks 201 languages and costs $7/month through a cloud API.
The previous version was already good. This one beats it and runs nearly 9x faster. For most bots doing most work, this is the pick.
Good at: Everything a typical bot needs. Email, calendar, CRM, chat. Costs: $7/month via Groq. Limitation: Your data passes through a cloud provider.
DeepSeek V3.2 (Best for Complex Work)
The strongest multi-step reasoning you’ll find in an open source model. Other models stumble on the third or fourth step of a task. DeepSeek keeps going.
If your bot researches prospects, compiles reports, or chains several steps before acting, pick this one.
Good at: Research chains, sales prospecting, multi-step analysis. Costs: ~$19/month via Together AI. Limitation: Too large to run on personal hardware. Cloud only.
Llama 4 Maverick (Best Memory)
Meta’s latest. The standout: 1 million tokens of context. That’s enough to hold your entire email archive, CRM export, and company wiki in memory at once. It also reads images and documents natively, so your bot opens screenshots, invoices, and PDFs without extra tools.
Good at: Customer support (holds full conversation history), document-heavy work. Costs: ~$8/month via cloud API. Limitation: Meta restricts commercial use above 700M monthly users. You’re fine.
Gemma 3 27B (Best for Privacy)
Google’s model. The only one on this list that runs on a single graphics card. Your data never leaves your machine. No API bills. No rate limits. Nobody reads your emails.
Good at: Sensitive work. Legal, medical, financial. Costs: ~$10/month in electricity. No ongoing fees. Limitation: You need a high-end graphics card (~$1,600). Smaller than the cloud models, so it struggles with complex multi-step work.
Mistral Large 3 (Best for Code)
From France’s Mistral AI. Built for technical work. Their coding variant, Devstral 2, solves 72% of real-world engineering tasks. Best pick for bots that write code, generate reports, or automate developer workflows.
Costs: Comparable to Qwen via cloud API. Limitation: Overkill if your bot mostly handles email and meetings.
Head to Head
| DeepSeek V3.2 | Qwen 3.5 | Llama 4 Maverick | Gemma 3 27B | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliable Tool Use | ||||
| Complex Multi-Step Tasks | Basic | |||
| Large Context Window | ||||
| Runs on Your Hardware | — | — | — | |
| No Usage Restrictions | — | — | ||
| Reads Images/Documents | — | |||
| Under $10/mo | — | Free (local) |
What It Actually Costs
Your bot runs 200 tasks a day (one every 7 minutes during business hours). Here’s what each model costs:
| Model | Monthly Cost | |-------|-------------| | Claude Opus | $585 | | GPT-4o | $86 | | DeepSeek V3.2 | $19 | | Llama 4 Maverick | $8 | | Qwen 3.5 | $7 | | Gemma 3 (on your hardware) | ~$10 (electricity) |
Same workload. Rates from Together AI and Groq, February 2026.
$585 versus $7 for the same work. That’s not a rounding error. It decides whether your bot makes financial sense.
Can You Run These Locally?
Only Gemma 3 27B runs on personal hardware. The rest need servers.
| Model | Runs Locally? | What You Need | |-------|--------------|---------------| | Gemma 3 27B | Yes | High-end graphics card (~$1,600) | | Qwen 3.5 | No | Server-grade hardware | | DeepSeek V3.2 | No | Server-grade hardware | | Llama 4 Maverick | No | Server-grade hardware |
For most people, $7-19/month on a cloud API beats buying a $1,600 graphics card. If you need privacy, run Gemma 3 on your own machine.
Ollama handles local setup. One install, one command, OpenClaw connects automatically.
How to Choose
Best Pick for Each Job
| Use Case | Model | Why | |----------|-------|-----| | Email + calendar | Qwen 3.5 | Fast, cheap, reliable | | Sales prospecting | DeepSeek V3.2 | Best multi-step reasoning | | Customer support | Llama 4 Maverick | Holds full conversation history | | Legal, medical, finance | Gemma 3 27B (local) | Data stays on your hardware | | Code generation | Mistral Devstral 2 | Built for engineering tasks | | Multilingual support | Qwen 3.5 | 201 languages |
Getting Started
Cloud API (5 minutes): Sign up at Groq, Together AI, or Fireworks. Point your OpenClaw bot at it. Pick a model. Done.
Local via Ollama (15 minutes): Install Ollama. Download Gemma 3. OpenClaw finds it automatically. Your data stays on your machine. (Full walkthrough)
PageLines Hosted (3 minutes): Sign in with Google. Your bot launches with the right model for your workload. No provider accounts, no hardware, no configuration. We pick the model and keep it running. You run your business.
Bottom line: Five open source models do the same agent work as GPT and Claude at 2% of the cost. Qwen 3.5: $7/month. DeepSeek: $19. Gemma 3: free on your hardware. Your bot doesn’t need a $585/month brain. Set up yours on PageLines. Three minutes. We pick the right model.