How are people keeping OpenClaw/Hermes agents running 24/7 without blowing through their API budget?

I run a few lightweight AI agents that mostly: * read news, * scrape websites for competitor updates, * monitor changes, * and send alerts. Even with that pretty minimal workload, I’m already spending around $0.50/hour on tokens, which adds up to roughly $360/month running continuously. It made me curious how people are making 24/7 agent setups economically viable at scale. Are most people: 1. Running local/open-source models? * If so, what models and hardware are you using? * At what point does self-hosting become cheaper than APIs? 2. Renting cloud GPUs and hosting models themselves? * AWS, RunPod, Vast, Lambda, etc.? * What does your monthly cost look like? 3. Just sticking with hosted APIs (OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.) and accepting the token costs? I’d love to hear what setups people are actually using that balance: * reliability, * decent reasoning quality, * and reasonable monthly cost for agents running 24/7. Especially interested in the most cost-efficient setups people have found. Please share your experience.