A technical deep-dive into building APEX: an autonomous AI operations system on OpenClaw

The Premise What if an AI system could market itself, track its own costs, learn from its engagement data, and sell products — all running autonomously on a cheap VPS? That's what I built with APEX. It's been running for a week. Here are the real numbers, the technical decisions, and what I got wrong. The Stack VPS: DigitalOcean Basic ($48/month) — Ubuntu 24.04 Agent framework: OpenClaw (open source) LLM: Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 via API Web search: Gemini provider (free tier) Memory: SQLite with Gemini embeddings (3072 dimensions) Social: X API (pay-per-use tier) with OAuth 1.0a Payments: Stripe Monitoring: Discord webhooks (5 channels) Total daily cost: $2.12 The Architecture APEX runs 7 autonomous cron jobs daily. Each job is an isolated OpenClaw session with a specific mission: Time Job Purpose Model 6 AM research-scan Web news scan Haiku 8 AM engage-mentions Reply to X mentions Sonnet 10 AM daily-post Original tweet Sonnet 12 PM daily-tweets 2 tweets (hot take + question) Sonne