User Reports $868 AUD OpenClaw Bill, Duplicate Sessions, and Breakage After Updates

A Reddit user on r/openclaw reports spending $868 AUD on OpenClaw with Claude Sonnet in just over one month. While praising the tool's accessibility, flexibility, and productivity gains, they flag two critical issues: update instability and hidden cost duplication.

Update Breakage

Two OpenClaw updates completely broke their setup. Both times, everything stopped functioning. Recovery required manually editing JSON/config files. The user noted that claude.ai was the only thing that helped them restore functionality, and troubleshooting took unnecessary time.

Duplicate Telegram Polling Sessions

They discovered duplicated Telegram polling sessions were causing: double agent runs, duplicate tool calls, duplicate replies, and double token billing. This meant they were unknowingly burning through Claude Sonnet credits at 2x the expected rate.

User's Decision

As a result, they are moving back to Claude in-browser as primary tool for stability. They will still use OpenClaw when specifically needing accessibility or custom workflows, but reliability is now a bigger concern. They ask if others have experienced similar issues.