xAI now sells Grok across six 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, and SuperGrok Heavy sits at the top at $300 per month. On the API side, the new flagship Grok 4.20 runs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens at a 2M token context window, while Grok 4.1 Fast drops as low as $0.20 / $0.50 per million.
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, 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 it is the cheapest standalone path to full Grok 4.
- X Premium+ at $40/month bundles Grok 4 with X platform perks; pick it only if you actually use X.
- SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month is the only way to access Grok 4 Heavy, the multi-agent reasoning model with a 256K context window.
- Grok 4.20 API pricing is $2 / $6 per million tokens with a 2 million token context, the longest in the major-lab lineup.
- xAI gives every developer up to $175/month in free API credits through the data-sharing program, the most generous free tier among major AI providers.
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 sits on its own meter for video generation, billed in credits inside the consumer plans and per minute on the API.
Prices vary widely between these surfaces. The same Grok 4 that powers a free question on grok.com costs $3 per million input tokens through the API. SuperGrok at $30 and X Premium+ at $40 both unlock Grok 4; the difference is everything around it. 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+, Heavy)
xAI’s consumer stack has six tiers in 2026 after the SuperGrok Lite launch on March 25. The free plan handles casual chat. Paid tiers stack model power, more daily prompts, video generation and agentic features as you climb the ladder.
| Plan | Price (US) | Headline model access | Limits | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Grok 4 (limited) | ~10 prompts / 2 hrs | 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, daily caps | Light users wanting Imagine |
| SuperGrok | $30/month | Grok 4, DeepSearch, Voice, Imagine | ~100 prompts / 2 hrs | Most paid Grok users |
| X Premium+ | $40/month | Grok 4 + X Premium+ perks | Higher X limits | X power users who also want Grok |
| SuperGrok Heavy | $300/month | Grok 4 Heavy, multi-agent | Maximum limits everywhere | Researchers, heavy reasoning work |
All paid tiers include DeepSearch for live web research, Big Brain mode for extended thinking, and Voice mode for spoken chat. 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 Grok 4 access at a hard cap of around 10 prompts every two hours, plus roughly 10 image generations every two hours with Grok Imagine, basic real-time web and X search, and limited Voice mode access. There is no credit card required and no daily ceiling beyond the rolling 2-hour window. It is enough to test Grok before paying, but most active users hit the wall by mid-morning.
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. Daily creation caps apply, 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. The plan also includes around 100 prompts every two hours, DeepSearch, Big Brain mode, Voice mode, unlimited Grok Imagine image generation, and daily video renders. SuperGrok is the cheapest standalone way to use Grok 4 with no usage anxiety, and the annual billing discount makes it cheaper than X Premium+ over a full year. For a deeper look at how Grok 4 stacks up to OpenAI, see our 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. The Grok-side limits are roughly comparable to SuperGrok, but the $10/month gap vs SuperGrok 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 Heavy at $300/month
SuperGrok Heavy is the maximum tier and launched on July 9, 2025 at $300/month. It is the only consumer plan that unlocks 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 maximum rate limits everywhere, priority access during peak load, and early previews of upcoming xAI products including the multimodal agent and video generation. 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 50% discount for batch jobs. Below are the current rates from the official xAI Models and Pricing documentation. All figures are USD per 1,000,000 tokens at the standard tier.
| Model | Input | Cached input | Output | Context | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.20 | $2.00 | $0.20 | $6.00 | 2M | New flagship, agentic, lowest hallucination |
| Grok 4.1 Fast | $0.20 | $0.05 | $0.50 | 2M | Cost-leader, reasoning + non-reasoning variants |
| Grok 4 Fast | $0.20 | $0.05 | $0.50 | 2M | Non-reasoning sibling of 4.1 Fast |
| Grok 4 | $3.00 | $0.75 | $15.00 | 256K | Frontier reasoning, always-on thinking |
| Grok 3 | $3.00 | – | $15.00 | 131K | Legacy, kept for compatibility |
| Grok 3 Mini | $0.30 | – | $0.50 | 131K | Cheapest legacy model |
Batch mode runs every model at 50% off the standard list price with up to a 24-hour turnaround. Cached input drops to roughly 10% of the cache-miss rate on Grok 4.20, the single biggest lever for high-volume workloads with repeated context. 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 4.20 vs Grok 4.1 Fast pricing
Grok 4.20 is the new flagship, Grok 4.1 Fast is the cheap workhorse. Model Grok 4.20 costs 10x more per input token and 12x more per output token than 4.1 Fast at standard context. For most chat, search and retrieval tasks, Fast handles the load fine and saves an order of magnitude. Reach for 4.20 when you actually need agentic tool calling, the lowest hallucination rate, or strict prompt adherence on complex workflows.
A worked example: a 100K-token input prompt with a 2K-token answer costs $0.212 on Grok 4.20 ($0.20 input + $0.012 output) and $0.021 on Grok 4.1 Fast ($0.02 input + $0.001 output). Run that same job a million times a month and the difference is $212,000 vs $21,000. Picking the right model is the single biggest cost lever you have.
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 roughly 10% of the cache-miss rate on Grok 4.20 and about 25% on Grok 4. Pin your prompts to compound the discount.
- Batch mode. Non-urgent jobs get 50% off every model on the Batch API with up to a 24-hour SLA. 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.
- Free credits. xAI gives every account $25 in promotional credits at signup plus up to $150/month through the data-sharing program, totaling $175/month in free spend. That is the most generous free tier among major AI providers.
The data-sharing program lets xAI use anonymized API traffic for training, which is fine for prototyping and personal projects but a non-starter for sensitive enterprise data. Paid keys without data sharing are private by default.
Grok Imagine pricing (image and video generation)
Grok Imagine is xAI’s image and video generation engine. On consumer plans, it is bundled in. The free tier allows roughly 10 image generations every two hours, SuperGrok unlocks unlimited image generation plus around 100 video renders per day, and SuperGrok Heavy lifts the limits further. On the Grok Imagine API, video generation costs $4.20 per minute of generated video with audio. That is roughly a third of Google Veo 3.1 Preview at $12 per minute with audio, and around 7x cheaper than OpenAI Sora 2 Pro at $30 per minute. Grok Imagine is the cheapest serious video model on the API at launch.
How Grok pricing compares to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini
| Model | Input/M | Output/M | vs Grok 4.20 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.14 | $0.28 | ~14-21x cheaper |
| Grok 4.1 Fast | $0.20 | $0.50 | ~10-12x cheaper |
| Gemini 3 Flash | $0.50 | $3.00 | ~2-4x cheaper |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 | $12.00 | similar input, ~2x output |
| Grok 4.20 | $2.00 | $6.00 | 1x baseline |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $3.00 | $15.00 | ~1.5-2.5x more |
| Grok 4 | $3.00 | $15.00 | ~1.5-2.5x more |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $5.00 | $25.00 | ~2.5-4x more |
| GPT-5.5 | $5.00 | $30.00 | ~2.5-5x more |
Grok sits in the mid-cheap band at the API level. Grok 4.20 is 2.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 per output token and 4x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7, while offering the longest context window in the comparison (2M tokens). 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 4’s specific strengths: 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 4.1 Fast. It handles most chat, retrieval and classification at 10x cheaper than Grok 4.20. Escalate to 4.20 only when you actually need agentic tool calling.
- Cache your system prompt. Cached input on Grok 4.20 drops to $0.20 per million instead of $2.00, a 90% discount on every repeated prefix.
- Use batch mode for non-urgent jobs. 50% off every model 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.
- Burn the $175 free credits first. Signup gives you $25 plus up to $150/month through data sharing. That is enough to prototype most apps end-to-end before you pay anything.
- Pick Grok 3 Mini for ultra-cheap classification. At $0.30 / $0.50 per million tokens it is the cheapest legacy model still on the menu.
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 25,000+ 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 $0.20 per million tokens with up to $175/month in free credits.
If you build software, head to docs.x.ai and start with Grok 4.1 Fast. If you want the best standalone Grok consumer experience, SuperGrok at $30 is the obvious pick. 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 is coming next from xAI, see our Grok 5 release timeline and our hub of the best AI models in 2026.
FAQ
Is Grok free?
Yes. The free tier on grok.com gives every user about 10 prompts and 10 image generations every two hours, plus basic Grok 4 and Grok Imagine access. No credit card required.
How much does Grok cost per month?
Paid plans are X Premium at $8, SuperGrok Lite at $10, SuperGrok at $30, X Premium+ at $40, and SuperGrok Heavy at $300. SuperGrok is also available at $300/year, a roughly 17% discount on monthly billing.
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. Pick SuperGrok if you do not actively use X.
How much does the Grok API cost?
Grok 4.20 costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens with a 2M context window. Grok 4.1 Fast is $0.20/$0.50 per million, and Grok 4 is $3/$15 per million. Cached input drops to roughly 10% of the cache-miss rate on Grok 4.20.
Is Grok cheaper than ChatGPT?
At the API level, yes. Grok 4.20 is roughly 2.5x cheaper than GPT-5.5 per output token, and Grok 4.1 Fast is around 25x cheaper. On the consumer side, SuperGrok at $30/month is $10 more than ChatGPT Plus at $20/month.
What is the cheapest Grok model?
Grok 4.1 Fast at $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens is the cheapest current-generation model. Grok 3 Mini is the cheapest legacy model at $0.30/$0.50 per million.
