After Anthropic blocked third-party subscription usage for OpenClaw, developers are exploring cheaper alternatives to Claude Opus 4.6. The author switched from Claude Code when API pricing became prohibitively expensive, initially tried OpenAI's GPT-5.4 but found it too lazy to solve problems independently. Kimi-K2.5 emerged as a strong contender—priced at roughly 1/10th the cost of Claude Opus 4.6 at $0.6-3 per million tokens. Setting it up requires fetching an API key from OpenRouter and configuring OpenClaw to use the new model instead of Anthropic models, while removing all previous Anthropic references from environment variables to avoid OAuth issues.

Performance-wise, the ranking is Claude Opus 4.6 first, followed closely by Kimi-K2.5, then GPT-5.4—though the gap between the top two is smaller than expected. The main drawbacks are slower response times for simple queries and GDPR non-compliance when using Chinese models through external APIs, though self-hosting remains an option for data-sensitive applications.