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Marcus Webb
CFO · Terravolt Energy
Mar 17, 2026 · 8 hours
Cost & ROI

Real numbers: our OpenClaw deployment cost $47K/month. Here is the breakdown.

I've seen a lot of vague claims about AI agent costs so I'm sharing our actual numbers from a 3-month production deployment.

Monthly breakdown:
- Compute (4x A100 GPUs): $18,400
- API calls to external LLMs: $12,300
- Storage & bandwidth: $3,200
- Engineering time (2 FTEs maintaining): $8,500
- Monitoring & security tools: $4,600

Total: ~$47,000/month

What we got: automated customer support handling 68% of tickets, internal knowledge retrieval, and document processing.

ROI calculation: we replaced ~3.5 FTEs in customer support ($28K/month loaded cost) and reduced document processing time by 80% (saving ~$15K/month in contractor costs).

Net positive by about $-4K/month — meaning we're still slightly negative. But the quality improvement in response times is what sold the board.

Anyone else willing to share real numbers? The industry needs more transparency here.
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3 Comments

D
David Okoro
· CTO · Meridian Health Systems
8 hours
Thank you for sharing actual numbers. This is rare and extremely valuable. Our costs are similar but we're seeing higher API costs because we haven't optimized our prompt chains yet.
E
Elena Vasquez
· CFO · Cumulus Logistics
8 hours
The -$4K/month is interesting. How did the board react to a negative ROI? We're struggling to get approval because our projections show break-even at month 8.
M
Marcus Webb
· CFO · Terravolt Energy
8 hours
Board was okay with it because response time improvement translated directly to customer retention. We showed a 12% reduction in churn for customers who interacted with the AI support. That's worth more than $4K/month.