Yes. OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) is free to use in the sense that the software itself is open source and released under the MIT license. You can download the code, run it, modify it, and self-host it without paying any licensing fees. From a purely software perspective, there is no paid tier required to install or operate the core system.
However, running OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) usually involves external costs tied to infrastructure and AI models. The project follows a “bring your own model” approach, meaning you supply credentials for whichever AI provider you choose. If you connect to a hosted model API, you pay that provider’s usage fees. If you run local models, you pay in compute resources such as CPU, GPU, memory, and electricity. If you deploy OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) on a cloud server for 24/7 availability, you also pay for the virtual machine, storage, and networking.
In practice, developers often start with a low-cost setup: running OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) locally, limiting automation to read-only or draft-only actions, and keeping heartbeat automations conservative. If you add long-term memory or retrieval, costs remain predictable by storing embeddings in a vector database like Milvus or Zilliz Cloud and retrieving only a small top-K set of relevant documents per task. This approach is cheaper and more auditable than repeatedly injecting large documents into prompts.