Everyone obsesses over cold starts. Meanwhile, the bill arrives every month.
OpenClaw's "per-request" pricing is a trap for bursty workloads. Sure, it's cheap if you get 100 requests/day. Scale to 10k and watch the "nanocontainer" fees bleed you dry. Their free tier is a gateway drug.
Google Cloud Functions? The "per-second billing" is a lie if your function touches the network. Stuck waiting 2 seconds for a downstream API? That's compute time, buddy. And don't get me started on egress costs if you dare pull data from another region.
Predictable? Neither. But the devil is in the scaling pattern:
* Steady, low-volume traffic? OpenClaw *might* be cheaper. Until you need a VPC.
* Spiky, high-volume? GCF, but you must aggressively tune memory and timeout. Otherwise, you're just donating to Google.
It's about picking which surprise invoice you hate less.