The bill drops 85%
Our internal sales-deck Q&A bot was costing €1,420/month on OpenAI Assistants (gpt-4o + file_search). Post-migration, it costs €218/month on a €25 Hetzner VPS running OpenClaw 2026.4 plus OpenRouter as the LLM. That is a real €14,400 saved over a year — for one small tool.
What it cost us
Six weeks of one engineer's time. The hardest week was retrieval: file_search just works; self-hosted retrieval forces choices. We landed on Qdrant + bge-large + a custom chunker. Quality is 80–85% of file_search; not parity, but acceptable. Read the full diary.
What we kept on OpenAI
Whisper transcription. DALL-E for one-off graphics. And one frozen Assistant as a hot standby — never triggered, but the optionality is worth keeping. Migration purity is for marketing decks; the actual answer is hybrid.
Mentioned
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