xAI now sells Grok across seven consumer tiers plus a separate developer API, and the price spread between them is huge. The free tier costs $0, X Premium is $8 per month, SuperGrok Lite is $10 per month, SuperGrok is $30 per month, X Premium+ is $40 per month, the new SuperGrok Plus is $100 per month, and SuperGrok Heavy sits at the top at $300 per month.
On the API side, the new flagship Grok 4.5 (released July 8, 2026) runs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens at a 500k token context window, with the prior Grok 4.3 still available cheaper at $1.25 / $2.50. The cheap workhorses many guides still recommend, including Grok 4.1 Fast, Grok 4 and Grok 3, were retired on May 15, 2026 and now silently bill at Grok 4.3 rates. If you just want to know what you get without paying, see our full breakdown of whether Grok is free.
This guide covers every part of Grok pricing in 2026. We walk through every consumer plan, the differences between SuperGrok and X Premium+, the full Grok API token rates, how the new weekly usage pool and Extra Usage Credits work, the new Grok Imagine video pricing, and how Grok stacks up against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek. We also show the simplest way to use Grok alongside the other major models in one Mac app for one flat monthly fee.
The Key Takeaways
- SuperGrok Lite at $10/month launched March 25, 2026 as the new entry-level paid tier with Grok Imagine and one AI agent.
- SuperGrok costs $30/month or $300/year (a roughly 17% annual discount) and is the cheapest standalone path to full Grok; Grok 4.5 is rolling out to this tier in stages after its July 8, 2026 launch.
- X Premium+ at $40/month bundles Grok with X platform perks and is also receiving Grok 4.5 in stages; pick it only if you actually use X.
- SuperGrok Plus at $100/month is the newest tier, sitting between SuperGrok and Heavy for people who keep exhausting the $30 plan but cannot justify $300.
- SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month is the only consumer plan with full Grok 4.5 access today, plus Grok 4 Heavy and the maximum rate limits everywhere.
- Grok 4.5 API pricing is $2 / $6 per million tokens with a 500k token context and $0.30 cached input (an 85% cache discount); the prior Grok 4.3 stays available cheaper at $1.25 / $2.50 with a 1M context.
- Paid Grok plans now run on one shared weekly usage pool spendable across Chat, Imagine, Voice and Build; the per-2-hour prompt caps most guides still quote were retired in June 2026.
What is Grok pricing?
Grok pricing is split across four product surfaces, each metered differently. Consumer subscriptions charge a flat monthly fee for the standalone Grok app at grok.com. The X bundle stacks Grok inside an X Premium or X Premium+ subscription. The xAI API is pay-per-token, billed per million input and output tokens. Grok Imagine is metered separately on the API, billed per second of video, while on the consumer plans it draws from the same shared weekly allowance as everything else.
Prices vary widely between these surfaces, and the model names do not line up across them. The consumer apps still talk about Grok 4, while on the API that generation was retired in May 2026 and every request now lands on Grok 4.3 or newer. SuperGrok at $30 and X Premium+ at $40 differ in everything around the model rather than the model itself. Picking the right surface is most of the optimization work, and we walk through each one below.
Grok consumer plans 2026 (Free, X Premium, Lite, SuperGrok, X Premium+, Plus, Heavy)
xAI’s consumer stack has seven tiers in 2026, after SuperGrok Lite arrived on March 25 and SuperGrok Plus was added above standard SuperGrok. The free plan handles casual chat. Paid tiers stack model power, higher usage allowances, video generation and agentic features as you climb the ladder.
| Plan | Price (US) | Headline model access | Limits | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Grok 4 Mini (text only) | Free Chat and Voice allowance, own reset cycle | Casual users, quick questions |
| X Premium | $8/month | Grok 4 inside X | Higher than free, X perks | X-heavy users on a budget |
| SuperGrok Lite | $10/month | Grok 4, basic Imagine, 1 AI agent | 480p / 6s video, entry weekly usage pool | Light users wanting Imagine |
| SuperGrok | $30/month | Grok 4, DeepSearch, Voice, Imagine; Grok 4.5 rolling out | Standard weekly usage pool | Most paid Grok users |
| X Premium+ | $40/month | Grok 4 + X Premium+ perks; Grok 4.5 rolling out | Higher X limits | X power users who also want Grok |
| SuperGrok Plus | $100/month | Everything in SuperGrok, plus priority access at peak times | Much higher usage across Chat, Imagine, Voice and Build | Power users hitting the $30 ceiling |
| SuperGrok Heavy | $300/month | Full Grok 4.5 today, Grok 4 Heavy, multi-agent | Largest weekly usage pool | Researchers, heavy reasoning work |
All paid tiers include DeepSearch for live web research, Big Brain mode for extended thinking, and Grok voice mode for spoken chat. They also share one billing model. Since June 2026 every paid plan carries a single weekly usage pool you can spend across any Grok product instead of separate daily caps per product, and you track it in Settings under Usage. Annual SuperGrok billing brings the effective cost down to $25/month by paying $300 upfront, a roughly 17% discount. The current plan grid is published on grok.com/plans.
Grok free tier
The free tier costs $0 and covers casual use on grok.com and the Grok mobile apps. You get access to a lighter Grok 4 Mini model, plus basic real-time web and X search and limited Voice mode access. xAI does not publish the free numbers anywhere, but its own docs confirm the free tier keeps separate Chat and Voice allowances that sit outside the paid weekly pool and reset on their own schedule. Image and video generation through Grok Imagine is no longer part of the free tier.
xAI removed the last free image access on March 19, 2026, so any creation now requires a paid plan. There is no credit card required. Those same free allowances double as the safety net for paid users, because anyone who burns through a weekly pool falls back to free-tier Chat and Voice rather than losing Grok entirely. It is enough to test Grok before paying, but the ceiling arrives fast for anyone using it daily.
X Premium at $8/month
X Premium at $8/month is the cheapest paid path to Grok. The plan is primarily an X subscription, with verified checkmark, ad-free browsing perks and creator monetization, but it now bundles Grok access inside the X app. Limits sit between the free tier and SuperGrok. Pick X Premium only if you already want X Premium for the platform features and treat Grok access as a side benefit. If you mainly want Grok itself, SuperGrok Lite at $10/month or SuperGrok at $30/month is a stronger deal.
SuperGrok Lite at $10/month
SuperGrok Lite is xAI’s newest tier, announced by Elon Musk on March 25, 2026 at $10/month. It sits between the free tier and SuperGrok and is targeted at light users who want Grok Imagine access without paying $30. Lite includes basic AI image and video generation at 480p resolution and 6-second clip length, 2x longer Grok chats than the free tier, and access to one AI agent. Creation draws down the entry-level weekly usage pool, so it is not a Pro replacement. Pick Lite if you mostly want quick image generation and longer chats, and step up to full SuperGrok when those caps start to bite.
SuperGrok at $30/month
SuperGrok is the sweet-spot plan for most readers. At $30/month (or $300/year for two months free) you get full Grok 4 access at a 128K context window, with the new Grok 4.5 flagship rolling out to this tier in stages after its July 8, 2026 launch. The plan also includes a full weekly usage pool you can spend across any Grok product, DeepSearch, Big Brain mode, Voice mode, and Grok Imagine image and video generation. SuperGrok is the cheapest standalone plan with a full weekly allowance behind it, and the annual billing discount makes it cheaper than X Premium+ over a full year. For a deeper look at how the new Grok flagship stacks up, see our Grok 4.5 breakdown and our long-form Grok vs ChatGPT comparison.
X Premium+ at $40/month
X Premium+ sits at $40/month and is the X-bundled equivalent of SuperGrok. You get the same Grok 4 model access plus the full X Premium+ tier of platform perks: ad-free browsing, larger creator revenue share, longer post limits and priority X reply ranking. Grok 4.5 is rolling out to this tier alongside standard SuperGrok rather than at a separate cadence. The Grok-side limits are roughly comparable to SuperGrok, so the $10/month gap is paying for X features rather than more Grok. If you do not actively use X, save the $120/year and pick SuperGrok instead.
SuperGrok Plus at $100/month
SuperGrok Plus is xAI’s newest consumer tier and sits between standard SuperGrok and Heavy at $100/month. It exists for a specific complaint, which is people who kept running out of usage on the $30 plan long before the week was up but could not justify a jump to $300.
The pitch is capacity rather than a better model. Plus includes everything in SuperGrok and adds significantly higher usage across Chat, Imagine, Voice and Build, faster replies, priority access during peak times, app creation and deployment from a single prompt, and early access to new features.
Pick Plus if you are buying Extra Usage Credits most weeks. Top-ups start at $5, are web-only for now, expire a year after purchase, and bill at standard rates rather than the cheaper effective rate baked into your plan, which is why xAI itself tells regular top-up buyers to upgrade instead. If you mainly need the strongest reasoning rather than more of it, the money is better spent on Heavy.
SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month
SuperGrok Heavy is the maximum tier and launched on July 9, 2025 at $300/month. As of July 2026 it is the only consumer plan with confirmed full access to Grok 4.5, while standard SuperGrok and X Premium+ are still receiving 4.5 in stages. Heavy is also the only tier that adds Grok 4 Heavy, xAI’s multi-agent reasoning model with a 256,000 token context window, parallel test-time compute, and the highest benchmark scores in the lineup. You also get the largest weekly usage allowance of any consumer tier, priority access during peak load, and early previews of upcoming xAI products. Heavy targets professional developers, research teams and quant traders where reasoning quality directly drives revenue. Most paid users do not need it, but for a small group $300/month is cheaper than the time it saves.
Grok API pricing 2026 (per million tokens)
The Grok API is billed per million input and output tokens, with separate rates for cached input and a batch discount on some models. Below are the current rates from the official xAI pricing documentation. All figures are USD per 1,000,000 tokens, and xAI charges double on every model once a prompt reaches 200k tokens.
| Model | Input | Cached input | Output | Context | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.5 | $2.00 | $0.30 | $6.00 | 500k | Flagship (July 8, 2026), coding and agentic focus; no batch discount |
| Grok 4.3 | $1.25 | $0.20 | $2.50 | 1M | Prior flagship, lowest current-gen reasoning rate; 20% batch discount |
| Grok 4.20 (reasoning) | $1.25 | $0.20 | $2.50 | 1M | Agentic long-context option; 20% batch discount |
| Grok 4.20 (non-reasoning) | $1.25 | $0.20 | $2.50 | 1M | Same rates without reasoning tokens |
| Grok 4.20 (multi-agent) | $1.25 | $0.20 | $2.50 | 1M | Multi-agent variant; 20% batch discount |
| Grok Build 0.1 | $1.00 | $0.20 | $2.00 | 256k | Coding model behind the Grok Build CLI |
Batch mode takes 20% off, and only on Grok 4.3 and the three Grok 4.20 variants; xAI states plainly that models not on that list get no batch discount, and that includes the Grok 4.5 flagship. Cached input is $0.30 per million on Grok 4.5 and $0.20 on the rest, the single biggest lever for high-volume workloads with repeated context. Priority Processing runs the other way, billing 2x standard rates for lower latency. xAI also bills server-side tools separately. Web Search, X Search and Code Execution are $5 per 1,000 calls, File Attachments are $10 per 1,000 calls, and Collections Search is $2.50 per 1,000 calls.
Grok 4.5 vs Grok 4.3 vs Grok 4.20 pricing
Grok 4.5 is the flagship as of July 8, 2026, and Grok 4.3 stays in service as the cheaper long-context option. There is no longer a budget tier beneath them. Grok 4.5 prices in at $2 / $6 per million tokens with an 85% cache discount that drops cached input to $0.30 per million. It is trained on real coding-agent data and carries a 500k token context window, narrower than Grok 4.3’s 1M, which points it squarely at coding and agentic work rather than bulk long-document jobs. One caveat is worth budgeting for, because Grok 4.5 pricing doubles for inputs longer than 200k tokens.
At $2 / $6 it costs more than Grok 4.3 at $1.25 / $2.50, so reach for the older Grok 4.3 when you want the lowest current-gen reasoning rate, which it shares with the Grok 4.20 line, or its full 1M-token context, and step up to Grok 4.5 for the strongest coding and agentic performance. The cheap tier that used to sit below them is gone. Grok 4.1 Fast, Grok 4 Fast, Grok 4 and Grok 3 were all retired on May 15, 2026, and their slugs now redirect to Grok 4.3, so old code keeps working but bills at $1.25 / $2.50 instead of the rates people remember.
Even at flagship rates, Grok 4.5 is over 60% cheaper than GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5 per token, and it scores 54 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ahead of every Gemini model, though the open-weight Kimi K3 is above it at 57.
Example of Rates
A worked example on the current rates. A 100K-token input prompt with a 2K-token answer costs $0.212 on Grok 4.5 ($0.20 input + $0.012 output) and $0.130 on Grok 4.3 ($0.125 input + $0.005 output). Run that same job a million times a month and the difference is $212,000 against $130,000. Picking the right model is still the single biggest cost lever you have, so send only the coding and agentic work that truly needs the flagship to Grok 4.5 and route everything else to 4.3.
How does Grok API pricing work?
Grok API pricing has five levers, and each one moves the needle.
- Tokens. Every request is metered in input tokens (what you send) and output tokens (what the model generates). One million tokens is roughly 750,000 English words.
- Cached input. Repeated context (system prompts, shared retrieval chunks) is billed at $0.30 per million on Grok 4.5, an 85% saving, and at $0.20 on Grok 4.3, Grok 4.20 and Grok Build. Pin your prompts to compound the discount.
- Batch mode. Non-urgent jobs get 20% off on Grok 4.3 and the Grok 4.20 variants with up to a 24-hour SLA, and nothing at all on Grok 4.5. Run nightly summaries, classification jobs and bulk transformations in batch.
- Server-side tools. Web Search, X Search, Code Execution and File Attachments are billed separately at $2.50-$10 per 1,000 calls. Strip them from prompts where you do not need them.
- Long-context surcharge. Every model doubles once a prompt reaches 200k tokens, and the doubled rate applies to every token in that request rather than only the ones past the line. Grok 4.5 goes from $2 / $6 to $4 / $12.
There is no free API tier to lean on any more. xAI used to hand out up to $150/month in credits through a data-sharing program in exchange for training on your traffic, and plenty of guides still quote it, but it now appears nowhere in xAI’s documentation, not in the pricing page, the billing guide or the developer FAQ. The quickstart tells you plainly to load an account with credits before your first request. Billing is prepaid by default, with auto top-ups from $25 and monthly invoiced billing available on request.
Grok Imagine pricing (image and video generation)
Grok Imagine is xAI’s image and video generation engine. It is paid-only as of March 19, 2026; the free tier no longer includes any image or video generation. SuperGrok Lite adds basic image and video generation, SuperGrok adds a full weekly usage pool you can pour entirely into image and video if you want, and SuperGrok Heavy lifts that allowance further. One quirk is worth knowing before you budget, because xAI confirms that 720p videos silently fall back to 480p once you hit your tier’s 720p cap.
On the Grok Imagine API, video is billed by the second rather than the minute, starting at $0.05 per second for grok-imagine-video and $0.08 per second for grok-imagine-video-1.5 at 480p, so a full minute runs $3.00 to $4.80. Resolution drives the rest of the bill, because grok-imagine-video-1.5 costs $0.14 per second at 720p and $0.25 per second at 1080p, which works out to $15 a minute. Stills are $0.02 per image, or $0.05 to $0.07 on the quality model depending on whether you render at 1K or 2K. Resolution is what decides whether Grok wins on price. At 480p it heavily undercuts Google Veo 3.1 Preview at $12 per minute with audio.
At 1080p, Grok’s $15 per minute lands above Veo and still well under Sora 2 Pro, so budget by output resolution rather than by model name. SuperGrok ($30/month) and X Premium+ ($40/month) also include the R-rated Grok Imagine Spicy Mode for paid users on iOS and Android. For the full lineup head-to-head, see our best AI video generators comparison.
How Grok pricing compares to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini
| Model | Input/M | Output/M | vs Grok 4.3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.14 | $0.28 | ~9x cheaper |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | $0.20 | $1.20 | ~2-6x cheaper |
| Gemini 3 Flash | $0.50 | $3.00 | cheaper in, ~1.2x out |
| Grok Build 0.1 | $1.00 | $2.00 | ~1.25x cheaper |
| Grok 4.3 | $1.25 | $2.50 | 1x baseline |
| Grok 4.20 | $1.25 | $2.50 | same rates, same 1M context |
| Grok 4.5 | $2.00 | $6.00 | ~1.6-2.4x more (flagship) |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.00 | $12.00 | ~1.6-4.8x more |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 | $12.00 | ~1.6-4.8x more |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $3.00* | $15.00* | ~2.4-6x more |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | ~4-10x more |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $5.00 | $30.00 | ~4-12x more |
*Claude Sonnet 5 is on introductory pricing of $2 / $10 through 31 August 2026; the $3 / $15 standard rate resumes in September.
Grok sits in the mid-cheap band at the API level. New flagship Grok 4.5 at $2 / $6 is over 60% cheaper than GPT-5.6 Sol ($5 / $30) and more than 4x cheaper on output than Claude Opus 5 ($5 / $25), while Grok 4.3 and Grok 4.20 both carry a 1M context at $1.25 / $2.50. OpenAI’s 30 July 2026 cut changed the OpenAI columns, though: GPT-5.6 Terra now matches Grok 4.5’s $2.00 input exactly, and Grok keeps that comparison only on output, where $6 beats Terra’s $12.
Below both, GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.20 / $1.20 undercuts every model in xAI’s current catalog. On the consumer side, SuperGrok at $30/month is $10 more than ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro at $20/month, and $10 more than Google AI Pro at $19.99/month. The gap is paying for Grok’s specific strengths, namely real-time X knowledge, Grok Imagine video, and Voice mode. For more on how Grok compares head-to-head, see our long-form Grok vs ChatGPT comparison and our Gemini pricing guide for the Google side.
How to optimize Grok API costs
A few simple moves can cut a Grok bill by 50 to 90 percent.
- Default to Grok 4.3 for high-volume work. At $1.25 / $2.50 it handles most chat, retrieval and classification at roughly a third of Grok 4.5’s output cost, and it carries the wider 1M context. Escalate to Grok 4.5 only for the strongest coding and agentic runs.
- Cache your system prompt. Cached input drops to $0.30 per million on Grok 4.5 (an 85% discount) and $0.20 per million on Grok 4.3 and Grok 4.20, a huge saving on every repeated prefix.
- Use batch mode for non-urgent jobs. 20% off Grok 4.3 and the Grok 4.20 variants on the Batch API with up to 24-hour turnaround. Perfect for nightly classification, summarization and ETL jobs.
- Strip server-side tools you do not need. Web Search and X Search at $5 per 1K calls add up fast. Disable them when the model can answer from prompt context.
- Leave Priority Processing switched off unless latency pays for itself. Priority bills at 2x standard rates across input, output, cached and reasoning tokens, and you are only charged the premium when the response confirms it actually ran at the priority tier. Background and batch work never needs it.
- Check which slug your code actually sends. The retired Grok 3 and Grok 4 slugs still resolve, so nothing breaks, but every one of those requests is now billed at Grok 4.3 rates. Audit your model strings before you trust an old cost estimate.
When it comes to subscription, there is no paid Grok free trial; see our AI free trials master list for what does have one.
Want Grok without juggling subscriptions? Try Fello AI
Most readers do not actually want to manage four pricing surfaces and three subscriptions. They want to chat with Grok when Grok wins, then swap to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini when those are the better tool. Tab-juggling, account-switching and prompt-history fragmentation eat all the productivity gains.
Fello AI is the simplest fix. One subscription gets you Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity and several other top models in a single Mac, iPhone and iPad app for $9.99 per month. There is no per-token billing, no usage cap to budget around, and no separate account to manage for each provider. Everything lives in one chat window with one shared history.
Why Fello AI works well for Grok users
The free Grok tier is throttled, SuperGrok at $30/month is a real chunk of money, and X Premium+ forces you to pay for X features you do not need. Fello AI gives you Grok inside a polished Mac-native experience for a third of the SuperGrok price, with prompt history, file uploads, image analysis and voice input. You can also switch models mid-conversation when Grok is not the right tool for the next question. If your prompt is better suited to Claude’s writing or DeepSeek’s cheap reasoning, swap models without losing context. We also keep an up-to-date guide on Grok for Mac for users who want a Grok-only setup.
What it actually saves you
Stack the standard subscription cost of the major consumer plans together. SuperGrok is $30/month, ChatGPT Plus is $20/month, Claude Pro is $20/month, Google AI Pro is $19.99/month, and Perplexity Pro is $20/month. That is roughly $110 per month just to cover the headline tier of each. Fello AI compresses the same lineup, plus DeepSeek, into $9.99/month, with 27,000+ five-star reviews across the App Store and Mac App Store. It is the most-loved AI bundle app in the Apple ecosystem.
Conclusion
Grok pricing in 2026 looks complicated on paper but lands on a simple decision tree. The free tier covers casual use. SuperGrok at $30/month is the right pick for serious paid Grok use without X Premium+ fluff. X Premium+ at $40/month is for users who want both. SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month is for the small group running heavy reasoning workloads. The API starts at $1 per million input tokens, dropping to $0.20 on cached input, and it is prepaid with no free credit tier left to fall back on.
If you build software, head to docs.x.ai and start with Grok Build 0.1 at $1 / $2 for the cheap baseline and Grok 4.5 when you need the new flagship’s coding and agentic strength (or the cheaper Grok 4.3 for current-gen reasoning and its full 1M-token context). In case you want the best standalone Grok consumer experience and can wait for the staged Grok 4.5 rollout, SuperGrok at $30 is the obvious pick. If you want full Grok 4.5 access today on a consumer plan, SuperGrok Heavy at $300 is the only confirmed tier.
And if you want Grok alongside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek in one Mac app for a third of the price, Fello AI is the simplest route. For more on what just shipped, see our hub of the best AI models in 2026, and our full AI pricing comparison for how every major AI tool stacks up plan-by-plan.
FAQ
Is Grok free?
The free tier on grok.com gives every user a limited Chat and Voice allowance on a lighter Grok 4 Mini model, plus basic real-time web and X search.
How much does Grok cost per month?
X Premium is at $8, SuperGrok Lite at $10, SuperGrok at $30, X Premium+ at $40, SuperGrok Plus at $100, and SuperGrok Heavy at $300. Every paid has tier weekly usage pool, and you can top it up with Extra Usage Credits from $5 on the web. SuperGrok is also available at $300/year.
What is the difference between SuperGrok and X Premium+?
SuperGrok at $30/month is a standalone Grok subscription with no X perks. X Premium+ at $40/month bundles the same Grok 4 access with X platform perks like ad-free browsing and creator monetization.
How much does the Grok API cost?
Grok 4.5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens with a 500k context window, and an 85% cache discount drops cached input to $0.30 per million (pricing doubles above 200k tokens). Grok 4.3 and the Grok 4.20 variants are cheaper at $1.25/$2.50 with a 1M context, and Grok Build 0.1 is $1/$2.
Is Grok cheaper than ChatGPT?
At the API level, yes. Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 is over 60% cheaper than GPT-5.6 Sol at $5/$30 per token, and Grok Build 0.1 at $1/$2 is 5x cheaper on input. Since the 30 July 2026 cut, GPT-5.6 Terra matches Grok 4.5’s $2 input exactly, and GPT-5.6 Luna at $0.20/$1.20 undercuts every current Grok model.
What is the cheapest Grok model?
Grok Build 0.1 at $1 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens is the cheapest model in the current catalog, with Grok 4.3 and the Grok 4.20 variants just above it at $1.25/$2.50.
