Sonnet to Haiku , How We Cut AI Costs by 4x

Background

WSL OpenClaw had been running on Sonnet 4.5 for 20 days (March 11-30).

Daily cron jobs generated morning briefings and evening reports, always with the same result:

"LINE inquiries: 0. A quiet day."

This single line was being generated with Sonnet ($15/M output).

Discovery

When opening OpenClaw Chat on the office PC, we checked the WSL Gateway logs: all 5 agents were on Sonnet.

Solution

Changed all models to Haiku 4.5, encountered and resolved 4 errors.

Result

• **4x cost reduction**

• No functionality difference

• Established mission-based model allocation strategy