Goodbye Grok Bot

[u/hopalonghowie]

I’ve been using Grok Bot since day one, and I genuinely love it. Of all the agent setups I’ve tried, including my own OpenClaw and Hermes setups, Grok Bot has been my favorite.

The problem is the cost.

I was burning through my weekly included credits in about two days, then moving into on-demand usage. I ended up spending over $4,000 on additional usage. As much as I love Grok Bot, that just isn’t sustainable.
So I finally went looking for an alternative and found GrokOpenMausBot.

It’s definitely not as polished as Grok Bot yet, but I’ve been really impressed with how well it works. The overall experience is very similar, and it gives me a lot more control.

I can choose whatever model I want for each individual bot. The VM runs on my own server, so I control the infrastructure. I can use cheaper models for routine bots and save the more expensive models for the bots that actually need them.

The iOS app is also working great, which was important to me.

This isn’t meant as criticism of Grok Bot. I still think it’s fantastic, and if the economics worked for my level of usage, I would happily keep using it.

But after running through my weekly credits in two days and spending more than $4,000 on on-demand usage, I finally had to find another solution.

GrokOpenMausBot is not quite as polished yet, but it gives me most of what I loved about Grok Bot while letting me run it myself and control which models I’m paying for.

For anyone else who loves Grok Bot but is struggling with the usage costs, it’s definitely worth checking out.

[u/bored_man_child]

“I’ve been using Grok bot since day one” my brother it’s only been like 15 days

[u/ArmRevolutionary3314]

4 thousand USD on demand?! That sounds painful. I suggest everyone hear would like to get a bit more detail. What exactly was your GrokBot doing that much profitable ? Why did you wait for 4000 spending and didn’t stop at $1k for instance or less?

[u/MedalofHonour15]

I have no issues since I am under my weekly usage. I connected APIs and MCPs so it doesn’t need a lot of usage.

What was your main use cases that cause so much costs?

[u/misterbrokid → u/MedalofHonour15]

my man know whats up. gotta know basic architecture to work with crockbot

[u/MedalofHonour15 → u/misterbrokid]

Yea learned from vibe coding

[u/axeexcess]

Nice fake/bait post but not buying it.

[u/whinemenot → u/axeexcess]

yeah, looks totally made up.

[u/OneDev42]

Why aren't you using Hermes? Hermes does this exact same thing, it's just cheaper.

[u/Acceptable-Yard7076 → u/OneDev42]

Not OP but for automation tasks, I havent had nearly as much success with hermes. Definitely a me problem, I think Grok Bot is just a lot easier to get working well

[u/misterbrokid → u/OneDev42]

how can you get hermes to pixel click?

[u/cabsarehear → u/OneDev42]

Hermes does not. It’s not ready to go out of the Box and to my knowledge it still doesn’t have a chat/slack style front end. If I am wrong please show me

[u/Cryztoobal]

Yo lo dejé cuando vi que me había fundido 400 USD. Muy bonito todo, sí, pero a esos precios para una carga de trabajo tipo Deep Work Desk no es una herramienta, es una suscripción al sufrimiento. Así que me quedé con Hermes.

Ahora, si el uso consiste en ver vídeos de gatos, ver el correo del vecino y scrapear cuatro webs, el plan de 60 USD de Cursor va fino. Para trabajar de verdad, la factura ya empieza a tener más protagonismo que el producto. asi que Adios Grook Bot

[u/MountainDue4648]

not sure what your using it for but holy cow 4k.. with any new technology, compute costs money and I think its just something your gonna have to wait a couple years for new data centers to be built then these products will get cheaper over time

[u/Due_Information7573]

i tied OpenMausBot buggy as shit i would not recommend .... use hermes if you want a cheap option

[u/misterbrokid]

how do you control the infrastructure I just asked Crockbot and confirmed the IP and its cloud VM. what exactly was your use case to burn through 4K you had auto top up enabled, so it's obviously not a surprise

[u/Public_Hat_8161]

The model routing is probably the part that matters most here. cheap model for repeat jobs, stronger one only when the task actually needs it, plus hard spend caps per bot so one agent cant quietly burn through the budget.

If most of your bots are doing business work like email, sales, content or admin, Marblism is another option to look at since u dont have to run the infra yourself. Otherwise OpenClaw/Hermes + OpenRouter or LiteLLM gives u more control over models and cost.

[u/cabsarehear]

Love GrokBot but holy hell a 5 day wait period if you go through your session limits without any kind of warning or option to choose lower models???

[u/Code-Painting-8294]

i read a comment on hn by someone who tested grok bot said he spent more this past month than the last 5 years combined lol.. once you have got a bunch of bots running 24/7 on on-demand the tokens just go fast

if you want the always-on thing but some control on cost theres an open source alternative called openbot https://github.com/CopilotKit/OpenBot (free and self-hostable). you can pick a cheap model per bot and the pricey one only where it earns it... every action gets logged before it runs so you can actually see what burned the tokens. routines even auto-shut-off after a few failures so a broken schedule cant quietly rack up a bill.

tried it about a week ago, its more like a template than a product... best part imo was dropping in my own agent harness since it all runs on ag-ui protocol. you could run the bots under gvisor too and shape it to whatever you need

there are a couple of other alternatives that i have discovered but haven't tried them since they aren't open source

[u/Radiant-Chipmunk-239]

So.....what do you burn $4000 on?