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Building my own AI assistant on Telegram (migrating to OpenClaw saved me a ton!)

A while back, I built my own Telegram AI assistant on my spare time. Why? Because ChatGPT can’t do monitoring or cron jobs.

I wanted something that could track events for me automatically. Things like:

  • Watching crypto/gold/forex prices and alerting me if they cross some threshold
  • Tracking price changes of particular products
  • Monitoring news and financial data events

So I built it myself using OpenAI API (GPT-4o) and Perplexity API (sonar-pro model).

It worked. But it **cost me almost 20APIbillperday∗∗.Justtotracksomeevents.That′s>20 API bill per day**. Just to track some events. That's >300/month. Ouch.

Then I found OpenClaw

OpenClaw got released, and I decided to give it a try. The setup took some time, but once it was running, it felt magical.

The best part? I can use my existing ChatGPT subscription for auth. No API keys needed. This alone saves a ton of money.

Now it runs 24/7 on a VPS I rent for $7/month. That’s it. Seven dollars.

Some things I learned about OpenClaw:

  • It uses Brave Search API instead of Perplexity for the default search engine. Brave has a free tier, which is nice.
  • It’s not limited to Telegram. You can connect it to anything.
  • It has an Admin UI for managing everything.

The real game changer: it runs on its own computer

Because OpenClaw runs on a VPS, it can actually write files. This is super convenient.

Just like a human coworker, I can ask it to generate some files, and then I can just SSH into the server and download them. No weird workarounds, no copy-pasting from chat.

My setup now

Before OpenClaw: ~10−20PERDAY∗∗AfterOpenClaw:∗∗ 10-20 PER DAY **After OpenClaw:** ~7/month (VPS cost only), thanks to OAuth integration that lets me use ChatGPT Subscription

I can set up as many crons as I want without worrying about API bills piling up.

Currently, I’m using it for:

  • Event tracking (prices, news, financial data)
  • Content writing assistant. Every morning, I ask it to write content about a particular topic with some guidelines. It outputs .txt files, so I can just SSH in and grab all the work.

Should you try it?

If you want an AI assistant that can run tasks on a schedule, monitor things, and actually save files, I really recommend trying OpenClaw. The setup takes a bit of effort, but it’s worth it.

That’s it for today’s post. Happy holiday for people celebrating Lunar New Year next week!