u/Inothuman24

I am new to openclaw and stuff like this. And I just got a doubt while I'm scrolling the Reddit. I saw everyone is talking about OpenAI Anthropic and the best models to use via APIs so our agent can be more powerful and do the best tasks but I got this doubt.

Like when we can run open-source LLMs on our laptop or on our hardware, can't we generate an API key for that self-hosted LLM so I can use Openclaw as long as I want without paying anything to anyone?

If any one of you used this type of method before, can you please tell me what are the pros and cons of these? And is it good to even give a try?