Don't use Claude Max plans
You will get banned and it is against the terms. The models the community keeps coming back to (tested in real agent loops, not just chat): - Claude Sonnet 4 / 4.5 (via official API key) This is the cheat code. 90ā95 % of Opus quality for agents, 5ā10Ć cheaper, lightning fast, rock-solid tool calling. Most ex-Opus users say they literally canāt tell the difference in daily OpenClaw use. - GPT-4o / GPT-5.2 (native OpenAI support) Sometimes even better at certain coding/agent styles. Zero drama. - Gemini 1.5/3 Pro 1M+ context = god-tier when your agent needs to swallow whole codebases or long histories. - Moonshot Kimi (k2/k2.5) via OpenRouter Stupidly cheap + surprisingly sharp. A lot of heavy users live here now. - GLM models