After publishing the OpenClaw hands-on review yesterday, the most common questions from comments and group chats fell into five buckets: token costs, what it can actually do, local models, privacy and security, and day-to-day experience. Today I am picking the five most frequently asked questions and answering each one in detail.

I’ve been using OpenClaw heavily on my local machine for a while now. At first, I treated it like any other AI tool. But after wiring it into Telegram, Obsidian, scheduled tasks, local models, and my content workflow, I realized I had it completely wrong. Its real power isn’t answering questions – it’s doing sustained work on your behalf. It can receive messages, call tools, run scheduled tasks, dispatch to different models, build long-term memory, write results back to Obsidian, and delegate complex tasks to other agents. If you’re only using it as a chatbot, you’re tapping maybe 20% of what it can do.