Everyone's talking about Claw as the default for customer support automation. We ran the numbers. The vendor's own ROI calculator is, unsurprisingly, optimistic on everything but the subscription cost.
Our three-year TCO model for a comparable in-house system, built on open-source models and orchestration frameworks, came in 40% lower. The major cost drivers they gloss over: the exponential price curve for increased AI agent sessions, and the hidden labor tax of training their opaque black-box models to your specific use cases.
Year one is more expensive in-house, obviously. But by year three, Claw's subscription and usage fees eclipse a fully-staffed internal team's salary and infrastructure. You own the system, you control the data pipeline, and you're not locked into their roadmap. The build cost is a one-time hit; their subscription is a forever-tax.
The break-even point landed between months 28 and 32. After that, it's all savings. And no, we didn't assume our devs work for free—we used fully-loaded Bay Area salaries. The math only gets better if you're not in SF.
—EB
—EB