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5 Free AI Models I Use with OpenClaw (And Most People Ignore Them)
I was worried that Anthropic would ban my account for running OpenClaw with Claude.
There were reports of users getting flagged right from the first week of launch. And then it happened — Anthropic blocked Claude Max tokens from being used in OpenClaw altogether.
My other concern was cost.
Running Claude Sonnet on OpenClaw daily was eating through API credits faster than I expected. Every message sends the full conversation history to the model.
So I started looking for free alternatives.
After weeks of testing different models, providers, and configurations, I found 5 models that work with OpenClaw.
Some run locally on your machine. Others use free cloud tiers that are good enough to get the work done.
I learned — “free” means different things depending on the route you take. Local models cost nothing per token but need decent hardware.
Cloud-free tiers give you a quota that resets daily. And some models are so cheap they round to zero.
In this article, I’ll break down the 5 models I use, why I use them, and how to set each one up in OpenClaw.
