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The Stack / Chat Assistants
Grok
01 IntelligenceA situational yes — Grok earns a seat if X is where your audience or signal lives, because no other assistant reads that firehose natively. Grok 4.6 (August 12, 2026) is a genuinely frontier-class reasoning model at $2/$6 per million tokens, under half what Claude Opus 5 costs on the API, and it was trained with Cursor on coding workloads. As a primary thinking seat, Claude and ChatGPT still hold the line on raw benchmark scores, but the price gap makes Grok worth a second look beyond its X niche.
The job in the stack
The real-time-pulse seat: what's happening on X right now, plus a genuinely cheap fast API tier for high-volume tasks.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Grok inside X on tight rate limits |
| X Premium | $8/mo | Basic Grok access inside X |
| SuperGrok Lite | $10/mo | Standalone Grok sub, launched March 2026 |
| SuperGrok | $30/mo | $300/yr; higher limits, priority; Grok 4.5 arriving in stages |
| X Premium+ | $40/mo | Grok bundled with X platform perks; Grok 4.5 arriving in stages |
| SuperGrok Heavy | $300/mo | Max capability tier — the only consumer plan with full Grok 4.5 access today, plus Grok 4 Heavy multi-agent reasoning |
| API (Grok 4.1 Fast) | $0.20/M input | $0.50/M output; Grok 4.5 and 4.6 both at $2/$6 per M. Prompts over 200K tokens bill at $4/$12 per M for the entire request |
Pricing verified 2026-08-18. Plans change — the source of truth is Grok's own pricing page.
Models & versions
- Grok 4.6Current flagship, released August 12, 2026 — same $2/M input, $6/M output as 4.5, same 500K context, but a 5-point jump on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (61, level with GPT-5.6 Sol). Watch the long-context cliff: once a prompt crosses 200K tokens, xAI bills the whole request at $4/M input and $12/M output. Shipped same-day into Cursor, Grok Build, and the API
- Grok 4.5Previous flagship (July 2026), Cursor-trained for coding and agentic work; same $2/$6 per M pricing. Still the tier most consumer plans actually serve
- Grok 4.1 FastSpeed/cost tier — $0.20/M input, $0.50/M output
The honest read
What works
- +Native real-time X data — trend and sentiment reads no rival matches
- +Grok 4.5 puts frontier-class reasoning at under half Claude Opus 5's API price
- +SuperGrok Lite at $10 is a cheap dedicated entry point
What breaks
- −Fewer guardrails is a trust-boundary consideration for business use
- −Ecosystem (projects, integrations, agents) trails OpenAI and Anthropic
- −Tier sprawl across X subscriptions and standalone plans confuses the buy
Use it for
- →Creators and marketers whose distribution lives on X
- →Real-time sentiment and trend monitoring
- →High-volume, cost-sensitive API tasks on the Fast tier
Skip it if
- ×You need the deepest reasoning or writing seat — that's Claude
- ×X isn't part of your operation — the differentiator evaporates
Questions operators ask
?Is Grok a Claude/ChatGPT replacement?
For most operators, no — it's a specialist. The job it does that they can't is reading X in real time. Hire it for that job, keep your primary thinking seat where it is.
What changed
- News scan: xAI shipped Grok 4.6 on August 12, 2026 — now the flagship, listed ahead of 4.5. The operator-relevant part is what did not change: still $2/M input and $6/M output, still a 500K context. What you get for the same money is about five points of measured intelligence (61 on the Artificial Analysis index, level with GPT-5.6 Sol), which makes Grok the cheapest model currently sitting at the frontier. Added the long-context billing cliff we had never documented: cross 200K tokens in a prompt and xAI reprices the entire request at $4/$12 per M, so a single oversized context window costs double. Dropped Grok 4.20 from the model list — two generations back and no longer a choice anyone should be making. Consumer plan prices unverified this pass and left as previously recorded.
- Plan list corrected: the free tier and X Premium ($8) were collapsed into one row and X Premium+ ($40) was missing — both fixed. Grok 4.5 is reaching consumer plans in stages; SuperGrok Heavy is the only tier with full access so far. Verdict repriced against Claude Opus 5 (launched July 24 at $5/$25), which replaces Opus 4.8 as the comparison point — Grok 4.5 at $2/$6 still lands under half the cost.
- NEWS SCAN: Grok 4.5 launched publicly today, trained with Cursor for coding/agentic work — Opus-class capability at $2/$6 per M tokens vs. Opus 4.8's $5/$25, using roughly 4x fewer tokens per task. Verdict and pros updated to reflect the price/capability shift; X-native real-time data remains the primary differentiator.
- Added to the stack (real-time-pulse seat). Verified: SuperGrok Lite $10 (Mar 2026), SuperGrok $30, Heavy $300; API Grok 4.1 Fast $0.20/$0.50 per M.
Give Grok a job
The real-time-pulse seat: what's happening on X right now, plus a genuinely cheap fast API tier for high-volume tasks.
Try Grok →Alternatives with different jobs
Claude
02 DecisionsThe thinking seat: long documents, hard reasoning, code, and anything where the words have to be right the first time.
ChatGPT
02 DecisionsThe generalist seat: quick answers, brainstorming, voice mode, and the widest plugin/app ecosystem when you need breadth over depth.
Perplexity
01 IntelligenceThe research seat: current-events questions, competitive research, and any claim you need sourced before it ships.