OpenClaw API Key: Which Key Does Your AI Agent Need? (Complete Guide 2026)
You installed OpenClaw. The setup wizard is running. Then it asks for an API key. Which one? From where? And will it cost you $200 next month if you pick wrong?
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10+ years of Rails, and I'm still learning. Practical tips for web apps, AI integration, and what actually works in production.
You installed OpenClaw. The setup wizard is running. Then it asks for an API key. Which one? From where? And will it cost you $200 next month if you pick wrong?
In January 2026, Censys found over 21,000 exposed OpenClaw instances on the open internet. That didn't surprise me. I helped build ClawHosters and see every day what goes wrong when people try OpenClaw Hosting themselves.
42,900 OpenClaw instances are sitting exposed on the public internet right now. Guess how many you could hack with Remote Code Execution? 15,200. This isn't fear-mongering - those are the numbers from Bitsight from the last two weeks.
I pay 600 dollars a month for Claude. Three Max20 accounts, each regularly hitting 100% of the weekly limit. Once I started 12 Claude Code sessions simultaneously on my M4 Air. That was too much. Five in parallel works fine though.