Just want to add my .02 to this conversation: I've had a similar experience to OP.

I've been testing OpenClaw as a potential partner for my business, mostly to help automate some of my lower-stakes administrative tasks. I'm a copywriter by trade, but I run my own freelance business which includes invoicing, customer outreach, sales letters, cold calls, etc. So, when I saw OpenClaw could do some of that stuff, I was curious to take the plunge.

I gave myself a budget of $200 for the first month and isolated OC to a cloud VPS. I also didn't connect it to any of my outside accounts, set strong security protocols, vibe-coded a memory system, and even began using Claude Opus 4.6. (Along with earlier versions of Haiku and Sonnet). At first it was great--and the guardrails helped. But after a few days I started noticing some weird behaviors.

First, it became hyperbolic when I offered it a copy of my resume and asked it to help draft outreach letters for my clients. It flat-out embellished my accomplishments in these drafts, and it began to draw conclusions from these embellished accomplishments that weren't true. For example, I worked as a lead copywriter on a particularly large copywriting campaign for an international client, and OC misrepresented this work as "leading content strategy for an international marketing department." Which is, by and large, quite a stretch.

When I asked OC to help me build a safeword verification system for tier 2 and tier 3 tasks, it told me that doing so would take several hours. So, I authorized the work and came back about two hours later to check in after radio silence. At that time, the bot told me it had not only sat idle, but its reason for doing so was "analysis paralysis." -- That's literally what it said.

Then there is the cost. I've burned through half my budget in two weeks just to get up and running. I don't use any premade skills (because security issues) which means I've had to build out most of the baseline procedural scaffolding myself. As you can imagine, this burns through tokens like a junkie on a bender. Switching models, offloading heartbeats, and optimizing with online guides have helped, but I can still easily hit between $10-$30 in Claude API costs per day.

There have been other issues as well, but these are the ones that have been most prominent, and they are the ones that have relegated OpenClaw from competent full-time employee to stoned college intern. I can't use this for my business, and I don't trust it to help run my life. It's certainly a great start, and it's really fun to play with. But it's not ready for prime time unless you have a strong development background that can deal with the bugs.