OpenClaw stats don't add up

I was setting up OpenClaw and went looking for best skills and hosting - and I'm really puzzled.

On one hand I see runaway popularity - 247K GitHub stars. 13,700 community skills. - I read about Chinese cloud provider forks. Stock market rally. Hosting providers offering managed OpenClaw hosting, same tier as WordPress.

But when I look at OpenClaw hub - the most-downloaded skill has 35K installs - Highest-rated skill: 132 stars

247K stars vs 35K installs looks like huge gap for me.

Other observations - Popular skills are pedestrian connectors (Gmail, search, Obsidian, Home Assistant) — things a dozen other tools already do - a lot of stock/trade skills, many in Chinese - I get charged per API call (I use Claude) on top of my monthly subscription

I read news about - "lobster trade", where stock rallies on OpenClaw-related announcements - Government subsidy: Shenzhen offering up to $1.4M grants for OpenClaw-based one-person companies, Wuxi $730K - company stock rallying in China when a company announces OpenClaw

I wanted to use OpenClaw in conjunciton with my robotics startup PMF search. I checked OpenClawRobotics - a community site for applying OpenClaw to robotics - and it appears to be abandoned. The signup form doesn't work.

Claude tells me - managed OpenClaw hosting now available is the telling signal. Infrastructure providers commoditize projects when novelty has passed and recurring revenue becomes the play. Late-cycle behavior, not early-cycle. - "Lobster trade" is a stock market phenomenon, not product adoption.

Don't get me wrong, I love the OpenClaw project. But I can't help noticing this and scratching my head.

What do you think?

10 points | by iliaov 1 day ago

5 comments

  • SyntaxErrorist 1 day ago
    You’ve made some great points. It’s odd that OpenClaw has 247K GitHub stars but only 35K installs on the most popular skill. The basic skills like Gmail and Obsidian seem to be drawing the most attention, but they feel more like short term solutions. The managed hosting and the stock rally suggest that it's becoming more about the infrastructure and recurring revenue, rather than true product adoption. I’m with you there’s potential here, but it’s tough to say where it’s really headed.
  • seonagi 1 day ago
    Free trials generate the stars, but charging both monthly and per-call fees filters for experimenters over builders. People explore but don't commit to production. Prob why most installs end up abandoned or as toy connectors nobody ships.
    [-]
    • azmz 1 hour ago
      Dual billing does filter out anyone trying to ship a persistent workflow. What flipped it for me was not running my own instance at all, automations described once, managed OAuth across ~1000 services, memory that carries across runs so the agent builds on what it's seen. Been building atmita.com in that shape (from scratch, not an OpenClaw wrapper).
  • glaslong 23 hours ago
    I mean n=1 but I starred, pulled, messed with using and extending it for a week, then dumped it and went back to my DIYclaw because it seems to spend fewer tokens and get more consistent results.

    None of these projects are very good, but infra providers are happy to sell shovels to the hype rush.

    [-]
    • azmz 19 hours ago
      Your DIYclaw experience tracks. Leaner setups beat bloated ones for people willing to wire things up themselves. Been building atmita.com as a cloud-hosted version for the crowd that won't do that at all: scheduled automations with bounded context and managed OAuth, so runs don't spiral into token churn. Honest tradeoff is less flexibility than a tuned DIY harness.
  • rvz 1 day ago
    > Hosting providers offering managed OpenClaw hosting, same tier as WordPress.

    Almost no-one is making money out of OpenClaw other than the hosting providers.

    That is why the OpenClaw hype is dying. It's just a way for people to throw their money away on tokens and the model providers extracting money from that.

    There is no use case for it other than wasting tokens.

    [-]
    • muzani 1 day ago
      That and Claude/Codex are setting up their own equivalents. The hosting companies and AI wrapper companies are rolling out their own built up clawdbots.
  • openclawclub 1 day ago
    [dead]