What it does

OpenClaw Zero Token is a fork of OpenClaw that drives the official web UIs of major LLM providers instead of their paid APIs. You log in once through a Chrome debug session; the tool captures cookies and bearer tokens via Playwright CDP, stores them locally, and reuses them to expose a unified gateway on port 3001. It supports DeepSeek, Qwen (intl/cn), Kimi, Claude, Doubao, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Zhipu GLM, Xiaomi MiMo, and Manus.

The interesting bit

The tool-calling layer is prompt-injected: it stuffs tool definitions into the chat prompt and parses the model’s text response to invoke local tools (web_search, exec, read, write, etc.). Eleven of thirteen web models support this, though Doubao is excluded due to stream parser limitations and Gemini’s DOM polling is flagged unstable. The “AskOnce” feature broadcasts one query to multiple providers and shows answers side by side.

Key highlights

• Zero API cost: No credit card, no per-request billing; credentials stay local in auth.json
• 13 providers tested, including China-specific variants (Qwen CN, GLM intl)
• Tool calling via prompt injection for 11/13 web models, with keyword-gated middleware to reduce ban risk
• Agent workspace isolation: file access restricted to a configured directory
• Daily workflow is three shell scripts: start-chrome-debug.sh → onboard.sh → server.sh

Caveats

• Requires Node.js ≥22.12, pnpm ≥9, and Chrome in debug mode; Windows needs WSL2
• Gemini chat is marked unstable (⚠️) and Doubao lacks tool support entirely
• The README is truncated mid-sentence in the “Clean rebuild” section, suggesting documentation may be incomplete
• Manus uses an actual API key (free quota), not the zero-token web flow

Verdict

Worth a look if you want to experiment with many LLMs cheaply and don’t mind babysitting a Chrome debug session. Skip it if you need production reliability, strict Terms-of-Service compliance, or a fully headless setup.