Original Author: 黑色小虾笼, Deep Tide TechFlow
OpenClaw has become a sensation in China. How many people around you are anxious, and how many are counting their money?
Some travel nationwide, flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Hangzhou, specifically to configure this "Lobster" for small business owners, charging over ten thousand yuan per order.
Others directly install OpenClaw into Apple devices and ship them to customers, ready to use out of the box, accumulating $1.8 million in earnings.
Previously struggling crypto mining machine manufacturers have now pivoted to selling OpenClaw hardware.
Resellers of Token API relay stations are quietly making a fortune, with monthly profits reaching millions.
This is the real slice of the OpenClaw wave: on the surface, millions are tinkering with deployment, buying hardware, and purchasing courses; behind the scenes, a complete industry chain is monetizing this collective anxiety, layer by layer.
From selling hardware to cloud servers, from selling Tokens to Skills, the open-source code is free, but anxiety is the real commodity.
Turning OpenClaw into Hardware
A photo circulating online has left many people both amused and exasperated.
In the 1990s, qigong masters drew circles on people's aluminum pots, claiming to connect to cosmic energy; in 2026, people wear lobster hats in conference rooms receiving ideological洗礼, as if not raising a lobster means falling behind the times.
After the laughter, attention turns to the person speaking on stage. His name is Kong Jianping, a crypto OG and founder of iPollo.
Renowned KOL "Crypto Fearless" commented on social media: "In the crypto circle, the one always standing at the hottest spot is definitely Boss Kong Jianping... He never misses the big money and doesn't neglect the small change."
When Bitcoin mining was hot, he launched the mining machine company Nano Labs. When the metaverse boomed, he announced a shift from mining to metaverse business, stating the metaverse would usher in a new era for humanity; when Hong Kong's policies emerged, he布局香江, becoming a director of Hong Kong Cyberport; when the DAT concept heated up, he started a DAT company...
This time, with OpenClaw's popularity, Kong Jianping hosts offline events across the country, proclaiming that humanity has entered the "Web 4.0" era dominated by AI Agents, while launching the hardware iPollo Claw PC, officially described as "born for Open Claw applications," featuring an AMD 5600H processor, up to 64GB RAM, pre-installed with the native ClawOS system, priced at $439 on the official website.
Kong Jianping is not an isolated case; he is just the most visible name in this hardware industry chain.
In Dongguan, a hardware manufacturer's sales representative's朋友圈 is filled with lobster logos: OpenClaw Lobster Hardware Solution, OEM ODM supported, B-end and commercial clients welcome to inquire.
A standard white-label factory: anyone wanting to enter the market can make a call and have a "AI host optimized for OpenClaw" branded under their name.
Like this Dongguan company, many upstream in this hardware chain are former factories that made Filecoin and other cryptocurrency mining machines. They know this script all too well: concept explosion, hardware demand surge, branded premium, harvesting window.
The supply chain responsiveness honed in the mining era is just as effective in a new field.
The core logic of this business is no mystery: The Mac Mini is the most widely recommended hardware for running OpenClaw locally, but for most average users, a $300+ Mac Mini plus a command-line configuration without a GUI is too high a barrier. Thus, demand arises: someone sells a service to "lower the barrier," or simply sells a "ready-to-use" machine, monetizing that barrier.
The deeper the anxiety, the higher the premium.
Token Relaying is a Big Business
OpenClaw itself is free, but running it requires continuously feeding it Tokens for the large model.
Domestic large model companies like MINIMAX and KIMI have become major beneficiaries, but some still want to use overseas models like Claude and ChatGPT for complex tasks.
The trouble is: registering accounts and making payments is difficult, and Claude frequently bans Chinese-speaking users. Official API prices are steep; a heavy OpenClaw user running Claude at full capacity can easily cost over $800 per month.
This has spawned a massive Token relay market.
On the market, you can buy plenty of "50% or even 30% off Claude APIs," but their origin has always been a mystery.
On the surface, this industry is about making a price difference business: obtaining low-cost APIs, reselling at a markup, profiting from the middle margin. But the waters run much deeper.
At the bottom, some use stolen credit cards to批量注册 OpenAI and Anthropic accounts. After obtaining accounts, the most common tactic is to reverse-engineer the ChatGPT and Claude web interfaces, repackage them as standard APIs, and resell them.
The price list of one API relay station shows its reverse-engineered Claude Code API is 89% cheaper than the official price: official $0.024/K Token, it charges $0.0024/T Token.
Even more profitable is selling outright fakes.
In early March, CISPA (Helmholtz Center for Information Security) published a research report titled "Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs".
They found that nearly half of third-party API endpoints are engaged in bait-and-switch schemes.
You pay the API fee, happily thinking you're calling GPT-5, but the merchant is likely running an extremely low-cost domestic model in the background, or even a free open-source model run locally (like GLM-4-9B).
Among the 17 top independent shadow API service providers identified by CISPA's audit, 15 were operated purely by individuals, and over 88.2% lacked even the most basic Internet Content Provider (ICP) registration.
An practitioner engaged in relay API代理 told Deep Tide TechFlow that top relay APIs can achieve monthly profits in the millions, with demand very strong.
These are just stories on the cost side. Former Manus employee Yan publicly disclosed a deeper logic of this business: The core purpose of many Token relay stations is not selling APIs, but to gather high-quality distillation data for specific scenarios.
"All requests passing through the relay, the complete prompt plus response, are ready-made distillation data. Especially in OpenClaw's programming scenarios, users produce complex reasoning chains and real engineering decisions, dream training material for model companies. So the real business model of some relay stations is likely: collecting your relay fee is the surface business; packaging your request data and selling it to big companies for model distillation is the core profit. You are a paying customer and also a free training data producer—killing two birds with one stone."
Above this entire chain, there's another layer of business that looks cleaner: Token aggregation routing service providers, connecting you to a dozen model APIs, automatically routing based on task complexity—simple tasks go to cheap domestic models, complex tasks use Claude or GPT—claiming to save users 65% to 80% on API costs. The service itself has value. Those controlling this traffic entry point accumulate maps of real user usage earlier than any single model company.
Data is always the true asset.
Information Asymmetry is the Oldest Business
If the first two lobster gold mines rely on hardware and data, the third relies on something more fundamental: You know, and others don't.
Li Huan's recent business involves traveling nationwide. He carries his laptop, flying to Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, installing OpenClaw for local small business owners, connecting it to Feishu and DingTalk, debugging automated workflows and专属 Skills. Thousands, even tens of thousands of yuan per order, earning more in a month than many programmers' monthly salaries.
A counterintuitive fact is that Li Huan is not a programmer but comes from a liberal arts background. He candidly states he's not selling technology, but information asymmetry—transforming a hot concept into a product bosses can use directly, while providing emotional value to soothe anxiety.
Taking this logic to the extreme is an American named Adam Sand.
Adam is not an engineer either. He and his wife Allison run a roofing industry consulting business. After OpenClaw blew up, he did something the tech circle sees as having no barrier to entry: he pre-installed OpenClaw into MacBooks, connected them to roofing industry-specific Skills packages, HubSpot CRM, and ticketing systems, configured data security, and shipped them directly to customers. Plug it in, and the AI employee starts work. One-on-one training, ongoing weekly support, priced at $5000 per unit.
This project is called RoofClaw, with total historical revenue exceeding $1.8 million, delivered to over 360 roofing contractors.
Many people's first reaction: Isn't this just putting a free open-source project into hardware and charging $5000?
Yes. But Adam isn't selling software, nor hardware. He's selling the certainty that a roofing contractor, without understanding any technology, can have an AI employee start work tomorrow. Most pay the $5000 without hesitation, because he understands their pain points better than anyone, having worked in this industry for over a decade.
This is the essence of the information asymmetry business: truly understanding your customer's needs.
Back in China, this business has evolved into a different style.
On Taobao, several stores offering installation services have received over 1000 orders, with teams of dozens of engineers, earning 300,000 to 450,000 yuan in the past month just from installing OpenClaw. Some installers even promise in the product description "on-site deployment, plus one free cooking service, can cook家常菜".
This track is so hot that even Meituan and JD.com have entered the fray, partnering with Lenovo IT services to offer remote deployment services. From individual operators all the way up to internet giants, every level has people making money, indicating the demand is real and substantial enough.
Selling Skills is the other side of this logic.
In OpenClaw's plugin ecosystem ClawHub, community-contributed Skills plugins exceed 5700. Some sell ready-made Skills packages, some sell SOUL.md role configuration templates—AI CEO, Marketing Director, Legal Reviewer—for $19 to $99 each. Some sell custom development services, others sell "Complete OpenClaw Practical Tutorials".
The higher the technical barrier, the more people are willing to pay to lower it. This rule has never failed in any technology cycle.
The Shovel Sellers Are Never Anxious
On a Stripe-officially verified platform aggregating创业项目 with verified revenue, there are already 126 startup projects围绕 OpenClaw, ranked by verifiable revenue over the past 30 days.
The data is brutal: among the top 30 highest-earning projects, over 17 are doing the same thing—one-click cloud hosting.
Claw Mart made $54,000 in the last 30 days, Donely has total historical revenue of $747,000, RoofClaw has total historical revenue of $1.8 million.
But the other side of the story is: The half-life of information asymmetry is measured in "weeks," not "months."
The first wave of shovel sellers have already begun to retreat. A project called QuickClaw, promoting "30-second OpenClaw deployment on手机," quickly gained traction during a traffic surge week, then offered to sell the entire package for $300,000.
This is the most真实 rhythm of this wave: technology concept explodes, information asymmetry window opens, the first wave rushes in,红利 quickly dissipates, the shovel sellers sell their shovels and walk away.
Kong Jianping has long ingrained this rhythm into his muscle memory. He moved from Bitcoin miners to OpenClaw hosts, spanning an entire crypto era. Each time he accurately catches the wave, not because he understands the technology earlier than others, but because he understands human nature better—he understands the fear of "I can't fall behind," and how much people are willing to pay to消解 that fear.
That comparison picture of the qigong craze makes people laugh. The images from the two eras are structurally identical: aluminum pots and lobster hats are both rituals, visualizations of anxiety, symbols of "I'm already on the right side."
The only difference is that the lobster hat in 2026 is connected to a real industry chain behind it, more sophisticated, more adept at monetizing human nature.
During the 1849 California Gold Rush, the ones who made money weren't the miners, but Levi Strauss, who sold jeans.
This story has been told for 175 years, brought up again in every technology wave.
Because every time, it's right.
The shovel sellers don't bet on the technology's win or loss, they bet on the stability of human nature.
So they are never anxious.
