My OpenClaw Second Brain Replaced 4 Apps I Was Paying $127/Month For
Here is my monthly bill from January:
- Notion: $10/month
- Readwise: $8/month
- Mem: $15/month (AI search)
- Otter.ai: $17/month (meeting transcription)
- Superhuman: $30/month (email)
- Zapier: $29/month (glue between all of them)
- Instapaper: $3/month
- Random other tools: $15/month
Total: $127/month. $1,524/year.
And the worst part? I was still losing information.
Highlights from Readwise never made it into Notion. Meeting notes from Otter sat unprocessed. Zapier automations broke silently. Half my "knowledge management system" was just folders I saved things into and never looked at again.
So I replaced all of it with 7 OpenClaw workflows.
Not all at once. Over about 3 weeks. One workflow at a time. Each one replaced a specific tool or filled a gap between tools.
Here are the exact workflows, what they replaced, and how to set them up.
Workflow 1: The Morning Brief
Replaces: Manually checking email, Slack, calendar, and news every morning
Every day at 6:30 AM, my OpenClaw agent:
- Scans my inbox for anything urgent (flags emails from VIPs and anything with deadline language)
- Checks my calendar and summarizes today's meetings with relevant context
- Pulls my task list and identifies the top 3 priorities
- Scans 5 RSS feeds for industry news relevant to my work
- Delivers it all as one document
The output looks like this:
MORNING BRIEF — Monday, Feb 10
URGENT (2):
- Email from Sarah Chen re: contract renewal (deadline: Wed)
- Slack DM from engineering: staging is down
TODAY'S CALENDAR (3 meetings):
- 10:00 — Weekly sync with marketing (last week's action items attached)
- 13:00 — Customer call with Meridian Corp (account context below)
- 15:30 — 1:1 with Jordan (their OKR draft attached)
TOP 3 PRIORITIES:
1. Finalize Q1 pricing proposal (promised by EOD Tuesday)
2. Review the 3 PRs from last week
3. Send partnership deck to Datastream
NEWS:
- Competitor X launched a new integration yesterday (link)
- Relevant regulation update in EU (summary + link)
I used to spend 25-30 minutes every morning assembling this picture from 5 different apps. Now it is waiting for me when I wake up.
Time saved: ~25 minutes/day. 8+ hours/month.
Workflow 2: The Read-and-Remember Pipeline
Replaces: Readwise ($8/mo) + Instapaper ($3/mo)
I read a lot. Articles, papers, threads, newsletters. The problem was never finding things to read. It was remembering what I read.
My pipeline:
- I forward any article to a specific email address (or drop a URL in a Slack channel)
- OpenClaw fetches the full text
- It writes a summary: 3-sentence TLDR, key insights, and my-words restatement
- It tags it by topic and files it in my second brain
- Once a week, it generates a "This Week I Learned" document connecting ideas across everything I read
The weekly synthesis is the killer feature. Readwise gave me highlights. OpenClaw gives me connections.
Last week it noticed that 3 articles I read — about pricing psychology, SaaS churn, and behavioral economics — all circled the same insight about loss aversion in subscription products. It wrote a 400-word synthesis connecting them. I turned that into a blog post.
Readwise could never do that. It just stored highlights.
Cost replaced: $11/month. Value added: immeasurable.
Workflow 3: Meeting Memory
Replaces: Otter.ai ($17/mo)
After every meeting, I spend 2 minutes writing a quick voice note or text dump of what happened. Just the key points, in my own words.
OpenClaw takes that raw dump and:
- Structures it into a proper meeting note (attendees, decisions, action items)
- Cross-references it with previous meetings with the same people/project
- Updates any project documents with new decisions
- Adds follow-up tasks to my task list with deadlines
The cross-referencing is the part Otter could never do. When I meet with a client, my agent already knows what we discussed last time, what was promised, and what is overdue.
Before: "Hey, what did we agree on in that call 3 weeks ago?" scrolls through Otter transcripts for 10 minutes
Now: "What's the full context on the Meridian account?" gets everything in 5 seconds
Cost replaced: $17/month. Actually useful: yes.
Workflow 4: The Idea Catcher
Replaces: Mem ($15/mo) + random Apple Notes
I get ideas at bad times. In the shower. Walking the dog. 2 AM.
My setup:
- I text or voice-memo my idea to a Telegram bot (connected to OpenClaw)
- The agent captures it immediately
- It enriches the idea with related context from my existing notes
- It files it in an "Ideas" folder, tagged and dated
But here is the important part: every Friday, OpenClaw reviews the week's ideas and writes a one-page brief on the most promising one. It checks it against my goals, my current projects, and my past ideas to see if there is a pattern.
3 weeks ago it noticed I had captured 4 separate ideas over 2 months that were all variations of the same concept. I had never connected them. The agent did.
That became my next feature.
Mem charged me $15/month to search my notes with AI. OpenClaw connects them proactively.
Cost replaced: $15/month. Ideas lost: zero.
Workflow 5: The Weekly Review
Replaces: A Sunday evening ritual I never actually did
Every Sunday at 7 PM:
- OpenClaw reviews all my notes, meetings, tasks, and ideas from the past week
- It writes a "Week in Review" document:
- What I accomplished vs. what I planned
- Decisions I made and their rationale
- Open loops that need closing
- Patterns it noticed in how I spent my time
- It drafts a rough plan for next week based on outstanding items
The "patterns" section changed how I work.
Two months ago it flagged that I was spending 40% of my weeks in "reactive mode" — responding to others instead of working on my priorities. The data was right there in my meeting notes and task completions.
I restructured my calendar. Blocked mornings for deep work. The next week's review showed 60% proactive time.
No productivity app ever showed me that. Because no productivity app had all the context.
Cost replaced: $0 (I was just procrastinating). Value added: clarity I never had.
Workflow 6: The Knowledge Graph
Replaces: Notion's wiki feature + manual linking
Every document in my second brain gets automatically linked to related documents.
When I write a meeting note about pricing, it gets linked to:
- My "Pricing Strategy" concept document
- Previous pricing meetings
- Articles I read about pricing
- Ideas I captured about pricing experiments
I never manually create these links. The agent reads every new document and connects it to the graph.
After 3 months, I have a personal knowledge graph with over 300 documents and 1,200+ connections. I can ask "What do I know about customer retention?" and get a synthesized answer pulling from meetings, articles, ideas, and project notes.
This is why "second brain" tools fail. They give you a filing cabinet and expect you to maintain it. Nobody does. The connections are where the value is, and connections require effort that humans skip.
The AI never skips.
Workflow 7: The Nightly Digest
Replaces: Superhuman's "splits" and notification anxiety
At 9 PM, after I have stopped working, OpenClaw sends me a 30-second-read summary:
NIGHTLY DIGEST — Feb 10
TODAY'S OUTPUT:
- Finalized Q1 pricing proposal ✓
- Reviewed 2 of 3 PRs (1 remaining)
- Customer call with Meridian went well (notes filed)
INBOX STATUS:
- 4 emails need response tomorrow (none urgent)
- Sarah confirmed contract renewal — no action needed
TOMORROW PREVIEW:
- Light meeting day (1 meeting at 11:00)
- Top priority: Finish PR review + start partnership deck
BRAIN UPDATE:
- 2 new documents added today
- 1 idea captured (tagged: product)
- Knowledge graph: 312 documents, 1,241 connections
I read it. Close my laptop. Actually stop thinking about work.
Superhuman was $30/month and I still felt anxious about unread emails. Now I know exactly where everything stands.
Cost replaced: $30/month for Superhuman (I downgraded to Gmail). Anxiety replaced: most of it.
The Math
Before:
- $127/month in tools
- Information scattered across 6+ apps
- Manual effort to connect and maintain
- Still losing ideas and context
After:
- $9/month for Clawctl Starter
- Everything in one place
- Automatically connected and maintained
- Nothing lost
Savings: $118/month. $1,416/year.
But the real savings is not money. It is the 12-15 hours per month I spent maintaining my old system. Copying things between apps. Fixing Zapier automations. Searching for notes I know I took but cannot find.
That time is gone. The agent does it all.
How to Build This
You do not need to set up all 7 workflows at once. Start with one. I recommend the Morning Brief — it gives you immediate value and teaches you how to work with the agent.
Week 1: Morning Brief + Nightly Digest Week 2: Read-and-Remember Pipeline + Idea Catcher Week 3: Meeting Memory + Weekly Review Week 4: Knowledge Graph (this one builds on everything else)
Each workflow is a prompt + a schedule. Nothing more.
The knowledge graph is the only one that requires persistent storage. Which is why Clawctl matters — your documents survive restarts, get backed up, and stay available 24/7.
Get Started
Deploy OpenClaw on Clawctl and start with the Morning Brief. Set it up tonight. Wake up to your first briefing tomorrow.
Your second brain should not be another app you have to maintain. It should be an AI that maintains itself.
Deploy your second brain on Clawctl
Already running OpenClaw? Copy the Morning Brief prompt from our Second Brain skill template and have it running in 5 minutes.