Man, this just bit me too. I started playing with OC over the weekend (in a VM), and the spend was INSANE even though I wasn't doing anything. I don't see this as very useful as an "assistant" that wanders around and anticipates my needs. But I do like the job system, and the ability to make skills, then run them on a schedule or in response to events. But when I looked into what it was doing behind my back, 48 times a day it was packaging up 20K tokens of silly context ("Be a good agent, be helpful, etc, for 30 paragraphs"), shipping it off to the model, and then responding with a single HEARTBEAT_OK.

Luckily you can turn if off pretty easily, but I don't know why it's on by default to begin with. I guess holdover from when people used it with a $20 subscription and didn't care.

I can recommend Hermes Agent as an alternative to OpenClaw which actually works well, is properly architected, and doesn’t break three times a week.

Oh man... they even have a Nix flake in the repo. That pretty much sells it right there. :D

If you want something more lightweight, I made one that has no heartbeat by default: https://stavrobot.stavros.io.

It's very light on token usage in general, as well.

It’s really, really ridiculous just how many tokens OpenClaw burns when it’s not doing anything.