OpenClaw's $1.3 Million OpenAI Bill: What AI Agents Actually Cost in Production

Peter Steinberger spent a decade building PSPDFKit into a PDF framework running on over a billion devices. He joined OpenAI in February 2026, saying "I want to change the world, not build a large company." A few months later, his open-source project OpenClaw, the fastest-growing project in GitHub history with over 300,000 stars and 3.2 million users, racked up an OpenAI bill of $1,305,088.81 in a single month. 603 billion tokens. 7.6 million API requests. 100 Codex agents running simultaneously...