I tried this service a few weeks ago, and I commend the goal - but there were a few issues I ran into:
1. There are many interactions I just could not get to work. I may have done something wrong, but in general, I have the perspective that most products should "just work" if it's as simple as clicking a button or directing something. In this case, I'm tangibly talking about the Browser feature, and the Canvas feature. In my account, I tried many times to have OpenClaw use the Browser to access a website and send me a screenshot, and it regularly reported the Browser was inaccessible, even though I had enabled it via Klaus UI. Secondly, I asked it to write certain reports to the Canvas as HTML pages that I could review - the entries would show up as files I could click on, but the files themselves were always empty. 2. OpenClaw with tokens is insanely expensive - I blew through the $15 tokens in a matter of a day.
For the first, my guess is I misconfigured something, but it's really difficult to identify what is wrong. My expectation was that I could prompt via Telegram to configure anything and everything, but some link was missing. Although I am a technical person, my expectation was that I would not need to muck around via `ssh` to figure out where my files ended up.
For the latter - and more broadly - OpenClaw is not well understood for most, and I think they will be caught off guard just how expensive it is. $15 in tokens is not a lot with how inefficient OpenClaw can be. My suggestion would be:
1. Pre-configure OpenClaw with already extremely memory-efficient rules and skills. 2. Provide clear guidance/documentation on ideal agent setup with different models as necessary. I think OpenRouter attempts to achieve this pretty well, but you are providing a layer on top of OpenRouter that may not be obvious to less-well-versed people. 3. Batteries-included options should "just work" - I felt I wasted a lot of tokens just figuring out how to get the thing to do simple tasks for me.
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A lot of the notes I made are less about your product and what you've achieved, and more to do with OpenClaw. However, you've achieved one major milestone - which is the one-click setup of OpenClaw. But if your target demographic is the less technically inclined folks that want to be able to play with the bleeding edge of AI practices, I think your platform needs to guide users to how to actually use this thing, and become useful right away.
It may even be beneficial to showcase extremely clear workflows for users to get started and sell why they even want OpenClaw.
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Anyway, kudos on the release! It is not easy to ship and you've done that hard bit! I bid you good luck on the next phase!
Thanks for the feedback here, this matches a bunch of patterns we have seen.
One of the fundamental problems is OpenClaw is tech for nerds. It's hard to use, it breaks all the time, it's built on LLMs, etc. We'd like to be the one to bridge the gap but that will take a ton of work. It's something we spend all day thinking about. Some issues like the one you hit with canvas are likely some mix of our problem and the model doing something unexpected like putting the file in the wrong directory which is constantly a problem.
Also agree on the cost being a huge issue. We give $15 up front and it just disappears so quickly for many users. Some users switch to smaller models but often this just ends up with people being more unhappy because the performance is bad. Opus is the least likely to make mistakes but also the most expensive.
Thanks for the advice, it's great to hear you believe in it too! At a personal level, it means a ton to me. Just got to keep writing code.