Otterly: Route OpenClaw Through Your Claude Code Subscription

Otterly (npm package) is a lightweight tool that exposes your local Claude CLI as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server on localhost:11434. Any tool that speaks the OpenAI Chat Completions API — Cursor, Aider, Continue, OpenClaw, or plain curl — can point at it, and every request is billed to your existing Claude Code subscription rather than pay-per-token API rates.

This solves a specific pain point: after Anthropic's April 4 policy change cut OpenClaw off from Claude Code subscriptions, OpenClaw users on Pro and Max plans were forced to pay separate pay-per-token API rates for work that previously ran under the subscription. The Agent SDK credit pool mechanism drains quickly under sustained usage. One user running multiple OpenClaw instances on a Raspberry Pi at home saw costs spike immediately after the change.

How It Works

Otterly piggybacks on your authenticated Claude Code session. First request after a long idle may be slow while the session re-authenticates, but subsequent requests add only ~3–7ms overhead over the raw API. The OpenClaw recipe for pointing at Otterly's endpoint is documented in the README.

Known Limitations

• Shares Claude Code rate limits: If you hit the 5-hour cap in Claude Code, Otterly is down until it resets.
• Stubbed params: Some OpenAI-specific parameters (logit_bias, n>1, seed) are not implemented.
• Single-user only: Runs on your machine, for your subscription. Don't expose it publicly or resell access.

The FAQ on the Otterly website is honest about what the tool is and isn't, particularly around self-hosting, team use, and compliance with Anthropic's terms.