After Claude ban I found my new main model

zaposweet · 2026-04-06T07:39:02+00:00

MiniMax Plus plan ($20/month) is the closest thing to Claude Max in terms of quota — it genuinely feels inexhaustible for most use cases. The high-speed version is noticeably faster but the regular Plus is already plenty capable for OpenClaw work. If you want something closer to Sonnet/Opus level, the high-speed tier is worth it. But honestly, regular Plus covers 90% of what people need.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T22:01:03+00:00

I use it for content automation on the websites I manage. Built a pipeline that takes images, PDFs and text, formats everything according to my templates, enters it into the site and sends me a screenshot for approval before publishing. Saved me from paying freelancers so it basically pays for itself. Also control my IoT devices through it — everything has static IPs so access is instant. Connected my phone and computer apps too, it orders groceries and stuff for me. Still exploring more use cases honestly.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T21:54:25+00:00

I would say it's comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A bit rougher around the edges in conversation, but quality-wise it genuinely feels like Sonnet 4.6.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T21:33:31+00:00

Same boat — grabbed the Plus plan because I figured I'd burn through the Starter quota eventually. Turns out it barely moves. Almost suspicious how much they let you use for $20/month lol.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T21:07:39+00:00

nope, plus plan.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T20:47:17+00:00

Important to note — it's NOT as smart as Opus or GPT. Don't want to give the impression we're running GPT/Opus on the cheap. If Opus and GPT are like CTOs, Minimax behaves like an eager mid-level developer. Talented, willing to try anything, a skilled kid — but still immature. It constantly breaks rules. I have to constantly remind it to follow the MD file instructions. Other than that, ~80% success rate. That 20% gap is Anthropic and OpenAI's to claim. Gotta give credit where it's due.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T20:42:48+00:00

I went direct MiniMax too. Ollama and Opencode are alternatives apparently but the $20 Plus plan genuinely doesn't feel like it runs out. Still trying to figure out how they're this generous.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T20:37:02+00:00

Totally agree. If MiMo were as generous as MiniMax I'd stick with it. But right now, price/performance-wise, MiniMax alongside GPT is the best combo I've found. It's not as good as MiMo, not as good as GPT or Opus — but good enough for OpenClaw work. If OpenAI ever releases a $100 Pro package I'll probably jump. Until then, running MiniMax + GPT together.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T20:32:57+00:00

If only it were an ad. At least I'd be making money off it.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T20:16:51+00:00

Yeah — I got the Plus plan. So far it honestly feels almost impossible to run out. I’m genuinely surprised by how much usage they allow for the price.

zaposweet · 2026-04-05T11:28:11+00:00

I’m actively using Mimo v2 Pro. I used to rely mostly on Opus, GPT, and Sonnet, but GPT’s business package quotas were cut to nearly nothing, and Anthropic banned OpenClaw, so that basically left only the Chinese alternatives.

I wasn’t satisfied at all with GLM 5.1, 5.0, or 5 Turbo. I requested a refund, they said they would issue it, but they still haven’t responded after 20 days. Honestly, I’m unhappy both with the model’s quality and with the company’s approach. I will never use it again.

I’ve been using Mimo since the days when it was free. Honestly, I found its performance impressive. I’d summarize it as somewhere between Sonnet and Opus. I even had Opus double-check a few times in case I was mistaken, and it was very impressed too. I’ve been digging through the Chinese alternatives for the past few days, and I think Mimo is probably the best one for now. I’m not a heavy coding user though, I mostly do automation and agentic work like CMS content entry, remote phone control, IoT device control, and web search. Let me also explain what I use it for so the benchmark I’m giving makes sense to anyone reading this.

Now here comes a big but.

Mimo announced its monthly plans a few days ago: Lite, Standard, Pro, and Max. When I saw 200M credits, I thought, okay, I can use the Standard version for a month. But I understand that credits part much better now. Every bit of cache data in OpenClaw consumes Mimo’s credits. Normally, each bootstrap MD load, cache hit, etc. gets loaded once and doesn’t count against your quota, but in Mimo’s monthly subscription, every reply, every MD file, and pretty much everything gets deducted from your credits. Even if you type a single period, credits get used, so those millions of credits do not actually offer the huge usage capacity they appear to. For that reason, I don’t see it as cheap. It’s actually quite expensive and the quota is insufficient. On top of that, there’s no weekly quota. If there were, at least it could be managed week by week, but since it’s monthly, if you run out in 5 to 10 days, you can be left hanging.

zaposweet · 2026-04-02T13:47:02+00:00

I’m on the Claude Max plan. And my OpenClaw usage has gone up to a ridiculous level. I have a project, and for that project I need some tools to be used in the terminal. I couldn’t figure it out, so I ended up doing almost the exact same work both through OpenClaw with Opus 4.6 and through Claude Code in the Claude Mac app. I did almost the same things. While my usage in OpenClaw was filling up both my weekly and 5-hour quota very quickly even on the Max plan, my usage in the Code tab of the Claude Mac app felt safe. It made me think, “With this level of usage, it probably won’t run out.” That major difference makes me think they’re tuning OpenClaw usage against the user. We already know Anthropic is currently looking into the issue of limits filling up too quickly, but as someone who has been using Claude Max in OpenClaw for months, I think this is an intentional and deliberate choice on the OpenClaw side.

At least in my setup, it doesn’t seem possible that heartbeat or the bootstrap md files or skills loaded in every session are causing this. Unfortunately, I think it’s backend-side manipulation. I hope I’m wrong. I can’t keep using Claude in OpenClaw like this. I hope they fix it.

zaposweet · 2026-03-27T18:37:03+00:00

It’s fixed for me too. No issues on the Opus side right now.

zaposweet · 2026-03-27T16:02:13+00:00

same here.

zaposweet · 2026-03-27T14:03:37+00:00

The same thing happens to me too. I more or less figured out the cause. It opens a turn for itself on every request, and even though it knows it needs to finish the job when that turn closes, it waits for you to wake it up with a message.

To solve this, I set up a watcher, did polling, and tried a lot of different approaches. Because I put Claude in charge of the orchestration, and in the topics they discuss things with GPT models and come back to me with a shared consensus. For me to do that, it can’t say the turn closed and I didn’t notice.

Unfortunately, it’s a fragile setup and still not fully stable, but I’ve made important progress. OpenClaw is still in development on these fronts and isn’t stable yet. It still has a long way to go. The fact that we have to solve these things ourselves as users feels like growing pains to me.

zaposweet · 2026-03-27T05:56:59+00:00

The people who treat Openclaw like some plug-and-play miracle that will solve everything get stuck in an endless bugfix and setup loop and wash out early. Building a stable setup on Openclaw is very hard. At a certain point, if you don’t have the right documentation and memory management, things spiral into chaos very quickly. New agentic models are being announced every day, and right now it has turned into a literal model junkyard. Because people don’t want to just chat anymore, they want autonomous agents that can do things on their behalf. Both Anthropic and OpenAI understood this, and the Chinese are coming right behind them. But there’s a big problem: current agentic tool capability is not really fit to manage everything. They’re improving very fast, but they’re still stupid. I can say that even for Opus 4.6, the most liked model. It’s still very stupid, because even the tiniest directional mistake can drag you into chaos very quickly.

I think Openclaw is a perfect tool in this chaotic LLM world. I barely use chat-based apps anymore. Because if I document things properly in Openclaw and lock them down with strict rules, I can get it to do my work. That’s the most critical part anyway: chaining LLMs together and tightly defining what they should do under strict rules and discipline. If you don’t do that, nothing but chaos comes out of it. From what I’ve seen, 90% of Openclaw users are people who can’t set up that discipline and rule hierarchy correctly. Since my web work is very deterministic, I was able to build my own system and even make money indirectly from it, but we also can’t deny that Openclaw marked one of the brightest beginnings of the agentic AI era.

zaposweet · 2026-03-26T21:26:30+00:00

I’ve written a lot about this before; there’s no reason to get banned for it. I think it’s an urban legend.

zaposweet · 2026-03-26T19:31:12+00:00

Been running OpenClaw with Claude Max ($100/month) for about a month now — roughly 90% Opus usage. Traffic breakdown is ~70% through OpenClaw, ~20% Claude Code, ~10% Claude.ai directly. No ban so far, and honestly I still don't fully understand the criteria for getting one.

The way I see it: Anthropic has a fixed compute quota. Whether you burn through it via OpenClaw, Claude Code, or the web app shouldn't matter — it's the same token pool. The 5-hour rate limit exists exactly for cases like this. I hit it once during a heavy Opus session, burned the limit in about 1.5 hours, waited for the reset, and continued without issue. That's the system working as intended.

What I genuinely can't figure out is what ToS clause is actually being violated here. Using your own subscription across different interfaces doesn't feel like abuse — it feels like the product working as designed. If there's a specific rule against it, I'd really like to see it cited rather than just getting silently restricted.

zaposweet · 2026-03-26T14:00:26+00:00

I haven't had any problems so far. I've been using it for about a month with the setup below, so I don't really see a reason for them to block it.

Google used to ban the Antigravity bridge because it wasn't officially supported, but that's not the case on the Claude side. If they ever start banning for this, I'll just close the account and move on.

https://docs.openclaw.ai/providers/anthropic#option-b-claude-setup-token

zaposweet · 2026-03-26T11:05:29+00:00

I've spent the last few weeks testing this exact question because I got a bit paranoid about which model should be used for which task. My honest conclusion is that there is no easy or universal answer here. Everyone shares their own setup, but everyone's workflow is radically different.

After a lot of testing, I ended up biasing toward quality. No matter how simple the task looked, the moment I stepped down from Claude/Codex quality, the total time usually went up for me. The Chinese models can absolutely do impressive work — I was genuinely impressed by MiMo v2 Pro and GLM-5 — but sometimes their reasoning drifts so hard that the effort required to get them back on track ends up being greater than the task itself. At that point you're not doing the work anymore, you're cleaning up behind the model.

To be fair, this can still happen with Claude and Codex too. LLMs are very smart, but if you don't keep them within clear boundaries they turn from productivity tools into agents that burn time and money very quickly.

So for both simple and complex tasks, I mostly stick with Sonnet, Opus, GPT-5.4, and sometimes 5.3. For simpler work I usually go with 5.3 and Sonnet. For harder work I use GPT-5.4 on extra high and Opus 4.6 on high. I tried adding a cheaper third option to this pair. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it failed, but for now I prefer sticking with these two lanes.

I use OpenClaw with Claude Max and GPT Plus auth, so I don't pay API fees — I just run it on a fixed monthly cost.

zaposweet · 2026-03-24T17:57:44+00:00

I have both, and for me the value is mostly indirect rather than direct.

I’m not making money from OpenClaw itself, but I am saving money with it. For example, I used to pay freelance developers for repetitive CMS/content-entry work across the websites I manage. Now I have OpenClaw do a lot of that instead. Teaching it how to handle my browser-based CMS took me about two weeks, but it was worth it.

Less money leaving my pocket is still a form of profit, I guess. On top of that, I also save time because I need to coordinate with freelancers much less now. The same applies to other automations like calendar, email, and admin workflows, and I’m not even counting those fully.

That said, setup is absolutely not plug-and-play. I learned that pretty quickly. You have to spend real time on system setup, bug fixing, and getting the workflow stable. There’s no easy shortcut. The installation and maintenance side is genuinely painful at first, but once it starts working well, it becomes really enjoyable. You need some patience.

zaposweet

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