Quick answer: Grok's free plan is a standing plan, not a trial, and xAI's own table makes it more capable than the internet thinks. That table checks the Grok 4.6 model, image generation and Grok Build under Free, and dashes video generation, Expert mode and Grok Bot. SuperGrok at $30 is where Grok Bot appears, and that is the line that should actually make you pay.
The Ship Lean rule on Grok pricing: free stops working the day you want something that runs without you.
Published September 10, 2026. Every price and row verified on xAI's pricing page the same day.
Quick decisionYour situation
RungQuestions, current news, real-time search
Free, $0You want a working page or app built for you
Free. Build is on every planYou want still images
xAI's table checks Free. The detailsYou want video or Expert mode
SuperGrok Lite, $10You want a bot running on a schedule
SuperGrok, $30You will run bots daily and hammer the meter
SuperGrok Plus, $100. My verdictYou want the swarm-of-agents tier and top usage
SuperGrok Heavy, $300 (sign in to see it)Where xAI actually prints the prices
Here is the part nobody screenshots, because most people writing about Grok are not paying for it.My own SuperGrok subscription screen, captured September 11, 2026. Four priced tiers, including the two that the public pricing page refuses to put a number on. "Current Plan" is my $100.Same screen, Business tab. SuperGrok Business is $30 per seat. Enterprise is the only rung that genuinely has no number.
And here is what a logged-out visitor gets at the same company:xAI's pricing page, captured September 10, 2026. Three numbers. Scroll down and Lite and Heavy appear as columns in the comparison table with buttons and no price; those buttons hand you to grok.com, where the number only prints once you sign in.Plan
Price
Where the number is visibleFree
$0
Real-time web and X search (limited), voice mode, connectorsSuperGrok Lite
$10/mo
Signed-in subscription screen only. Apps from a single prompt, Expert mode, image and video, increased limits at regular speedSuperGrok
$30
The cheapest published rung with Grok Bot accessSuperGrok Plus
$100
Everything above, plus 1080p video and much higher usageSuperGrok Heavy
$300/mo
Signed-in subscription screen only. Highest usage at the fastest speed, X Premium+ included, dedicated supportBusiness
$30/seat
Signed-in subscription screen, Business tab. Team seats, RBAC, consolidated billingEnterprise
Not published
Contact sales, custom RBACOnly Enterprise has no number, and that one is honestly a sales conversation. Everything else is priced — you just cannot see four of the seven prices without an account. That is the actual story here, and it is why every roundup you have read quotes $30 and $100 and stops.
Every free-tier limit number on Google describes a system that died in June
If you search this question you will be told the free tier gives you 10 requests every 2 hours, per AI Toolbox, or 2 prompts every 2 hours, per AI Tool Discovery, or 3 to 5 images a day, per Arsturn. Those three numbers cannot all be right, and they sit on the same results page.
I am naming them because they are not scams, they are just stale. They are all describing message counting, which xAI retired in June 2026.
The most honest competitor on this question is DataStudios, which structures the comparison properly. Even there, check the limit numbers against the date.
What replaced it: paid plans get one weekly compute pool spent across any Grok product, where different products drain it at different rates. Per xAI's FAQ, the free tier is not on that pool at all. Free keeps its own limits on Chat and Voice, and those reset on their own schedule.
xAI publishes no per-tier number for either system. I wrote the full mechanics up in how Grok's usage limits actually work, and it is the page to read before you buy anything.
The free plan can build you a working website
This is the part nobody has caught up to.
Since August 19, 2026, Grok Build is on every plan. You describe a site or an app in the chat window, it builds a working version live, and there is a Publish button at the end that puts it on a link you can send someone. On the $0 plan.
So the free tier will build and publish a business's landing page, and will not make you a five-second video.
If that inversion seems backwards, it is, and it is real. What Grok Build actually is has my own session and the finished page it produced.
What free actually gets you, row by rowRead the Free column straight down. September 10, 2026.Row
Free
What it means for youGrok 4.6
Yes
Same headline model as the paid tiersImage generation (Imagine)
Yes
Stills are inVideo generation
No
This is the first real wallGrok Build
Yes
Websites and apps, published to a linkGrok Bot
No
Standing jobs need $30Real-time web + X search
Limited
The good part, rationedExpert
No
No longer-thinking modeWorth correcting a thing I believed until I read the row: free is not stuck on an older model. xAI's table checks Grok 4.6 across every column including Free. What free is missing is Expert mode, video, the bot, and headroom. Not the brain.
The genuinely good free feature is real-time web and X search. It is rationed, and it is still the reason to keep a free Grok account open even if you pay somebody else for everything else. Grok vs ChatGPT is where that comparison lives.
What the $30 buys, and the buried line is Grok Bot
The SuperGrok card lists the Grok 4.6 model, connectors, higher rate limits across all features, Expert, SOC 2 compliance, and image and video generation.
And one more: Grok Bot access.
That is the line that changes the math, because Grok Bot is not a better chat window. It runs standing jobs on its own cloud machine on a schedule, and it is metered separately from your chat pool. You are not paying $30 for a chatbot. You are paying it for a chatbot plus something employee-shaped.
If you have not met it, start with what Grok Bot is, then the 12 jobs I run.
I pay $100, and I did not buy it for the chatMy actual billing screen, captured August 28, 2026. SuperGrok Plus, $100 a month.
Nobody else writing about this ladder is showing you an invoice, so here is mine and here is the honest accounting behind it.
Did I over-buy? I do not think so, but not for the reason you would guess. I did not buy $100 for a better chat window.
I bought it for Grok Bot, and the bot pool is a different meter from the chat meter. The bot meter is the one doing work in my account. The chat and Build meter is not.
I am deliberately not putting percentages on that. I could not get a clean capture of the usage pane while writing this, and this site does not print numbers it cannot show you. When I can screenshot the meter, it goes on the page.
What it means without the numbers: if I used Grok the way most people use Grok, I would be wasting most of what I pay for.
I also did not add this on top of everything. I funded it by downgrading one of the $200 coding subscriptions I was already paying for, which is the same trade I described in ChatGPT Pro vs SuperGrok Plus. That was a bet on Grok Bot specifically, and two weekends in it is looking like a good bet, which is not the same as being one. It is still early to tell.
So the recommendation I would actually give someone who works like me: start at $30. Give it one simple job and watch what it does to your usage. If you outgrow it quickly, then upgrade. Studying a tool and using a tool are two different things, and $30 buys you the second one.
The full $100 argument is its own page: is Grok worth paying for.
One trigger per rung
Not a feature grid. The specific moment each rung becomes the right one.Rung
What puts you on itFree, $0
Questions, news and real-time search, plus building a page you can publishSuperGrok Lite, $10
It sits between Free and $30, and adds video, Expert mode and single-prompt appsSuperGrok, $30
You want Grok Bot, or you outgrow the usage fastSuperGrok Plus, $100
You are running bots daily and babysitting a meter is costing you more than $70SuperGrok Heavy, $300
You want the swarm-of-agents mode, the highest usage and the fastest speedThe free-to-$30 trigger is the one that matters, so let me be precise about it.
If you want a simple chat box for random questions, free is good enough. Take advantage of it. You might already pay for X and have some Grok usage bundled there already.
The moment free stops working is when you want to build something serious. A repeatable workflow. An automation. A thing that runs on a schedule. That is not a feature you unlock, it is a different relationship with the tool, and it starts at $30.
Two gotchas that cost people money
X Premium is not SuperGrok. Two subscriptions, two billing relationships. Paying X does not get you Grok Bot, Build headroom or the weekly pool. People double-subscribe by accident and then wonder why the features they read about are not there.
Check the price on the day you buy. This is a product whose plan gating changed twice in six weeks, and I am not above it: this page had Lite and Heavy logged as unpriced until September 11, when I looked again and both carried a number. Check xAI's pricing page yourself, and I keep a dated changelog of these moves on my AI plan tracker.
Where this fits
If you are choosing between Grok and something you already pay for, that is Grok vs Claude or Grok vs ChatGPT. If the image question brought you here, Grok Imagine's free line is more interesting than it looks. If it was the app builder, Grok Build.
Everything I run day to day is on my Claude at work hub.
How I checked this: every price, row and gap comes from x.ai's pricing page read and screenshotted on September 10, 2026, plus xAI's own FAQ for the usage mechanics. The $100 account is mine and the billing screen is real. I have not used the free tier recently, so the free-tier description is xAI's published table rather than my own testing, and I have flagged the one row that corrected me. Last reviewed September 2026.
Quick answer: for still images, yes. xAI's own plan comparison table shows image generation checked under the Free column as of September 10, 2026, and video generation dashed. The most widely cited paywall story is a January 2026 restriction on X itself, and the pages still carrying it have not looked at the pricing page in months.
My read on Grok Imagine: the stills are the free part, the video is the paywall, and nobody selling you an alternative wants you to know the difference.
Published September 10, 2026. Plan rows verified on xAI's pricing page the same day.
Quick decisionYour situation
What to doYou want still images and you pay nothing
Use it; xAI's table checks Imagine on FreeYou want video
That is the paid line, on every tier above FreeYou want 1080p video
That is the $100 tier, SuperGrok PlusYou want to know your limit
Nobody publishes one. Here is the meterYou are choosing a rung to pay for
Free vs SuperGrok, per triggerxAI's own table says images are on the free plan
This is the whole page, so I am putting the receipt first.xAI's pricing page, captured September 10, 2026. Image generation (Imagine): checked under Free. Video generation: dashed under Free, checked on everything above it.
Two rows, one conclusion. Stills are in. Motion is what you are actually buying.
That single dash is worth more than the ten blog posts above this one on Google, because it tells you exactly which half of the product is behind the wall.
The widely cited January 2026 story happened on X
So why does the entire first page of search results tell you Grok Imagine is not free?
In January 2026, X restricted Grok's image generation and editing for non-paying users on X itself, after a backlash over what people were making with it. Gulf News covered it at the time and noted something the aggregators dropped: people who were not paying could still reach Grok's image features through the separate app and website.
That nuance did not survive. "You cannot edit an image in an X reply anymore" became "Grok Imagine is paid," and the pages carrying that claim have been ranking ever since without anyone rechecking it.
Look at who is ranking for this question and you will see why nobody corrected it. Most of page one is either a post from before the change or a site selling you a different image generator, with the disappointment as the hook.
xAI's own pricing page contradicts itself, and you should know that
I am not going to pretend the answer is cleaner than it is.Same page, same day, scrolled up. The Free card lists four things. Images is not one of them. "Image and video generation" first appears on the $30 card.
So the comparison table says images are on Free and the plan card does not mention them at all. Both are on xAI's pricing page right now.
My read, and I want to be clear that it is a read: the table is the more specific artifact because it distinguishes stills from video row by row, while the card is marketing shorthand for what the $30 unlocks. The card is not wrong that images get better above Free. It just is not the place to learn whether the free plan can make one.
Here is what I checked and what I did not. I read xAI's published table on the day of writing, on my own paid account, and I screenshotted it. I did not create a free account, so I have not personally watched a $0 login press generate and get a picture back. If you are on free right now, you can settle it in ten seconds, and your ten seconds beats my inference.
What I would not do is trust a number. xAI publishes no free-tier image cap, so every "3 images a day" and "5 to 15 a day" figure you will find is someone's estimate rather than something xAI has stated. Paid plans have run on one shared weekly compute pool since June 2026.
And here is the third contradiction, which cuts against me rather than for me. xAI's FAQ says the free tier keeps its own limits on "Chat and Voice" that reset on their own schedule. It names Chat and Voice. It does not name Imagine. If you wanted to argue the free plan does not really get images, that sentence is your best evidence, and I would rather hand it to you than pretend the table is the last word.
What an hour on the paid version actually produced
I have a SuperGrok Plus account, so this section is the paid experience. I am not going to dress it up as a test of the free tier.
I typed one thing and got four.One prompt, four variations, with Generate More and Think Harder waiting underneath. The play button on each tile is the video path.
Four variations from one prompt is the part that changes how you work. You are not iterating on one image and hoping. You are picking.
There is also a Discover surface, which is where you go to find out what the thing is capable of before you have any idea what to ask it for.Discover, same session. "Generate a cartoon" with no other direction.
It will not make you copyrighted characters. Ask for Mario and it refuses, which is the correct answer and also not a real limitation for anyone making a header image.
I will say the thing I did not expect to say: I used to think this was trash. It is not trash.
One is hands-free, the other is a control surface
This is the distinction that actually decides which tab you open, and I have not seen anyone else write it down.ChatGPT images
Grok ImagineHow you drive it
Describe it, it decides
Toggle settings, dimensions, elementsClosest comparison
An assistant
MidjourneyGood when
You want it handled
You know what you want and want to steerThe cost of that
Less control
More decisionsWith OpenAI you say it and it generates. It is more included, more hands-free, and that is a genuinely good experience when you do not want to think about it.
Grok Imagine goes the other way. You can select different elements, change specific things, and get very specific about dimensions. It almost feels like a Photoshop.
Neither of those is a criticism. They are two different products for two different moods, and knowing which mood you are in is the entire decision.
Not everyone agrees with me, and here is who
I formed my impression in about an hour. Named people who spent longer landed in different places, and you should have both.
TechRadar tested the image editing features and published the verdict in the headline: they are fun but will not replace Photoshop any time soon. That is a direct contradiction of my "almost feels like a Photoshop" reaction, and I am leaving it in rather than picking the quote that agrees with me.
We are describing different things. I meant the interaction model feels like an editor rather than a slot machine. They mean it will not do your actual retouching work, and they are right about that.
Notebookcheck filed it under "where AI brilliance meets mild trauma," which is about as accurate a summary of using this product as three words can be.
invideo put it as comparable to mid-tier specialist models on stills and trailing the premium options on motion. That matches the pricing table, which is a decent sign both are describing reality.
What flipped me, specifically
It was not one output. It was that it was intuitive, and that it was fast.
The generation speed is the thing. It felt slightly faster than the OpenAI image model I normally use, and I did not time it, so take that as an impression rather than a benchmark.
What I can count is the output: 4 options where I expected 1. That is the part that changes behavior, because you experiment instead of committing.
On raw quality, I am not going to overclaim. Compared against the newest OpenAI image model, which gets genuinely precise on the fine detail like skin and wrinkles, Grok is not the precision winner. But it generates some flawless images, and the gap is much smaller than it was the last time I looked.
That is the honest shape of it: I went from dismissing it to keeping it open in a tab.
Does it change my stack? Partly, and I will say where it does not
Yes, more than I expected, but not everywhere.It adds a real option for images. I thought the field was Nano Banana and OpenAI's image model. Grok has earned a place in that set.
It will not make my thumbnails. No reason to switch. What I use works, and thumbnails are the one place where I am not experimenting.
It might make blog images. A quick explanatory graphic, the kind of thing that is not worth a long session. That is the use case I would test next.
I will not be running it through a CLI. For me this is a browser tool, not part of an automated pipeline.If I am honest, I have not found the killer use case for it in my own work yet. It is on the radar now, which it was not last week, and that is a real change even though it is not a migration.
Where this fits
If your question is really about which plan to pay for, that is free versus SuperGrok, one trigger per rung, and the $100 question is answered separately. If you got here from the app-building side of Grok, Build mode is the other thing that is quietly on the free plan. For how this sits against ChatGPT generally, Grok vs ChatGPT.
The rest of what I actually run is on my Claude at work hub.
How I checked this: I read and screenshotted xAI's pricing page on September 10, 2026, and used Grok Imagine on my own SuperGrok Plus account the same day. I did not test a free account, and I say so above rather than implying otherwise. Outside verdicts are linked to the publications that wrote them. Last reviewed September 2026.
Quick answer: Grok Build is a mode in Grok's chat window. You click the hammer icon under the message box, pick Build, describe what you want, and it builds a working website or app live in the conversation with a Publish button waiting at the end. There is nothing to install. There is also a completely separate developer product called Grok Build that runs in a terminal, and that is the one Google shows you first.
The Ship Lean rule on Grok Build: prototype in whatever you already pay for, and never let one vendor own all of it.
Published September 10, 2026. Plan availability verified on xAI's pricing page the same day.
Quick decisionWhat you are trying to do
Where to goGet a one-page site or a small app without touching code
Build mode, in the Grok chat windowDay-job software engineering
The Grok Build CLI, or Claude CodeFind out whether your plan includes it
It does. Every plan, including freeWork out what it costs you
It draws on the shared weekly poolDecide whether to pay xAI at all
My $100 SuperGrok Plus verdictYou searched Grok Build and Google handed you a terminal
There are two products named Grok Build, and they are not versions of each other.
The one most search results describe is the CLI, announced May 25, 2026 as "a powerful new coding agent for professional software engineering and complex coding work." You install it with a curl command. It runs in a terminal, plans before it edits, and works across a codebase. People who have put real hours into it rate it seriously, and it is genuinely not for you if you do not write software.
The one you found in your chat menu is Build mode, announced two months later on July 28, 2026. xAI's own sentence for it: "There's nothing to install and nothing to configure, and you never have to touch the code unless you want to."
Same name. One needs a terminal, one needs a sentence.
If you are reading this because you clicked something in Grok and a preview pane opened, you want the second one, and the rest of this page is about that.
Your chat menu has five modes, not four
Every mode guide ranking on Google right now lists four: Auto, Fast, Expert, Heavy. Count the menu.My own session on September 10, 2026. Five modes, Build checked, on a SuperGrok Plus account. The prompt is sitting right there: "build a website for a local landscaping website."
Here is what each one is actually for:Mode
What it does
Gated?Auto
Picks between Fast and Expert for you
NoFast
Answers quickly, thinks less
NoExpert
Thinks longer before answering
Yes. xAI's table shows a dash under FreeBuild
Makes websites, apps, games and dashboards
No. Checked on all seven plan columnsHeavy
Runs a larger group of agents on one problem
Yes, and the most restricted of the fiveHeavy is the confusing one, because Heavy is both a mode in this menu and a plan tier. I am on SuperGrok Plus at $100 and I do not have Heavy mode. I do have Build. That is the distinction the guides are collapsing when they tell you Build is an advanced feature you have to buy.
xAI does not publish a price for the Heavy tier, so I am not going to print one. My own account is the evidence I have: at $100 a month, Heavy mode is not in reach and Build is.
One more thing the menu quietly buried: xAI's own FAQ now says "Grok Studio is no longer supported. Use Grok Build instead." If you are searching for Studio, this is where it went.
Build stopped being a top-tier feature on August 19
At launch, Build mode was an Early Beta limited to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. That is a real fact, it was true for three weeks, and it is why half the internet still says you need the top plan.
It stopped being true on August 19, 2026, when xAI published a follow-up post whose load-bearing sentence is: "Grok Build is now available on every plan, on the web and on mobile."
An announcement is not the product, so here is the pricing page on the same day.xAI's pricing page, captured September 10, 2026. Read the Grok Build row across all seven columns, then read the Grok Bot and Expert rows for contrast.
You can watch that gate close in real time in the reaction to the launch. @FFBuncho posted at Build Mode's announcement that you could publish an app to an xAI domain instantly with no domain contract, and added a note of disappointment that it looked to be SuperGrok Heavy only for now. That reservation was correct when it was written and stopped being true three weeks later, which is the whole problem with searching this question.
The same August 19 update also added remixing other people's published apps, custom domains and GitHub export. Small sites like Basenor still carry the Heavy-only headline in their URL, which is a decent illustration of how fast this fact went stale rather than a knock on them.
What one prompt actually produced in my first hour
I typed one sentence: build a website for a local landscaping website. That is the whole prompt, redundant wording and all.
It read the workspace instructions, connected to a machine, loaded design and scaffold skills, and started building while I watched a preview pane fill in. Then I closed the browser by accident, came back, and it had finished anyway.The finished page. Note the Publish button top-left. The business, the address and the phone number are all invented by the model.
It named the business Rowan Hill, dated it to 1994, placed it in Dutchess County, wrote the headline "Ground that feels as if it has always belonged," and built a working nav that scrolls you down the page.
It also built a real form, not a picture of one, though nothing is wired up to receive what someone types into it.Name, phone, email, a service dropdown and a free-text field, from one sentence of instruction.
My honest reaction in the moment was "holy shit," and I want to be precise about why: not because the output is remarkable in isolation, but because the input was one careless sentence and the thing finished on its own.
I would not hand that landscaping page to a real business yet
No. It needs tweaking, and the tweaking is my fault, not the model's.
A one-sentence prompt gets you a one-sentence site. Steal the prompt I should have written instead:The brand: the exact colors, the logo file, real project photos.
The place: the town and the service area, named.
The benchmark: one or two competitors ranking first in Google Maps for that keyword in that town, and what those sites actually have.
The brief: what the client wants that the competitors do not do.
Then let it iterate, because the second pass is where it gets good.It is also one page. You scroll, you click the menu bar, it scrolls for you. That is genuinely fine for a demo and it is not a business's website.
So the honest verdict: as a demo, yes. As something you invoice for, not off one prompt. What it changes is the cost of showing someone a mockup, and that is not nothing when you are pitching local businesses.
If that is the business you are in, the longer version of that pitch is selling AI builds to local businesses.
The other Grok Build is a terminal app for engineers
Briefly, because you may have landed here from a developer comparison.
The CLI is available to SuperGrok and X Premium Plus subscribers, runs interactively or headless, and runs multiple agents in parallel. Composio put 50-plus hours into comparing it against Claude Code, and Analytics Vidhya ran the same comparison under the headline "I Tested Both So You Don't Have To." I have not run that head-to-head myself, so I am pointing you at people who did rather than manufacturing a test.
I would ignore the SWE-bench numbers floating around this comparison. They are vendor-reported, they get copied between blogs without attribution, and they will not tell you anything about whether a landing page comes out right.
The model behind the CLI is grok-4.6. If you see a page claiming Grok 4.7, that page is guessing.
Grok Build usage limits: the same weekly pool as everything else
There is no separate Build allowance and no published Grok Build weekly limit. Per xAI's FAQ, Build sits on the one shared weekly usage pool alongside API, Chat, Imagine and Voice, and different products drain it at different rates. xAI publishes no per-tier number for any of them, so anyone quoting you a Build limit is inventing it.
The free tier works differently: it keeps its own Chat and Voice limits that reset on their own schedule, separate from the weekly pool.
I wrote the full mechanics up separately, because it is the single most misreported thing about this product: how Grok's usage limits actually work.
When to open Build instead of Claude Code
My actual rule, in the words I used out loud: choosing between these is like choosing between Macy's and JCPenney. They are more or less the same thing and it depends what is on sale.
What is on sale, for most people, is the ecosystem they already pay for.If you already pay for X Premium and a SuperGrok plan, Build is a no-brainer. You are not going to go buy a $200 Claude Code plan to do the thing you already have.
If you already pay for Claude Code or Codex, Build is your backup. When I run out of usage credit on Codex or Claude Code, I have Build sitting there for a dummy test or a throwaway prototype.
If you are picking one for serious work, I still think Claude Code and Codex are the two serious players. Lean on Claude Code when the copy has to be right; lean on Codex when the work is research-shaped.
If you are optimizing purely on budget, the interesting case is the top Grok plan. Instead of a $200 Claude Code plan plus a $200 Codex plan, one Grok subscription gets you Build, plus Grok Bot with its own separate usage pool, plus Cursor, which xAI's own Grok Bot launch post names alongside your Grok plan. That is a real proposition, not a gimmick.And here is the part I care about more than the feature comparison: you would be living entirely in their ecosystem. That is too risky for me. Do not put all of it on one vendor, however good the bundle looks this month.
The delta between these tools is small enough that people invent personalities for them. The delta that matters is which company owns all your work if they change the terms.
Where this fits
If you are working out the plan question rather than the tool question, start with what free Grok actually gets you, then whether the paid tier is worth it. If you came here from the image side of Grok, that is Grok Imagine, which shares this same weekly pool and has a very different answer on what free gets you.
Everything I run day to day lives on my Claude at work hub.
How I checked this: I used Build mode on my own SuperGrok Plus account on September 10, 2026 and screenshotted the session. Plan availability, mode gating and the announcement dates come from x.ai's own pages, read the same day. I have not tested the Grok Build CLI, and I say so where it comes up. Last reviewed September 2026.
Quick answer: Claude Code waits for you. Grok Bot works without you. That one line decides almost every routing question between them, and it is why I run both daily and have never had them compete for the same task.
Before anything else, the correction that half this SERP needs.
Grok Bot is not Grok Build
These are two different xAI products and several pages ranking for this query compare the wrong one to Claude Code without saying so.Grok Build is xAI's coding tool. That is the product that lines up against Claude Code as a coding tool.
Grok Bot is xAI's agent product. Named persistent bots, each with standing instructions, running on a cloud virtual machine.You do not have to take my word for the split, because xAI's own pricing page lists them as separate rows on different plans:xAI's pricing page, captured September 10, 2026. Grok Build ships on every tier including Free. Grok Bot only on the three individual SuperGrok tiers, and not on Business or Enterprise.
Different rows, different availability, different products. If a page tells you "Grok Bot is a terminal coding agent," it has not opened either one.
For the record: I have access to Grok Build and have not used it, so it gets no verdict on this page.
Claude Code waits for you. Grok Bot works without you
The obvious hypothesis is "does the job need my files." That is the line most comparisons draw, and in my setup it is wrong.
Grok Bot has access to my repo. It knows how to pull it, and if my computer is off, it knows how to SSH into my Mac mini.
It is even routing its browsing through that machine, so the bots do not look like bots and get slowed down by captchas. Nothing shady, just not being treated as a scraper while reading public pages.
So "whose files" does not separate them. Both can reach mine.
The real line is what kind of work it is:
Claude takes the content. All of it. Writing, building, the things where judgment about quality matters and I want to be in the loop while it happens.
Grok Bot is the sidekick. It runs analytics on everything. How is the long-form doing, how are the shorts doing, how is LinkedIn doing, how is the newsletter doing. It logs the wins and the losses. When something pops, it tells me. When someone comments on a thing, it logs it and tells me.
Consistent grunt work, on a schedule, that produces a record.Claude Code
Grok BotShape
Task-shaped, resets around each job
Employee-shaped, persistsWhere it runs
Your machine, your terminal
Its own cloud VM, one per accountWhose logins
Yours
Its own, authenticated onceWhen it works
While you are there
On a schedule, without youWhat I give it
Content and building
Analytics, inbox, monitoringWhat happens at 3am
Nothing
The job runsCost
Included on every paid Claude tier
From $30 on SuperGrokFailure mode
Stops
Can keep spendingWhy not just build the grunt work as workflows?
Fair question, and I did, for a long time.
The difference is not capability. It is that a conventional workflow can break silently.
You find out three weeks later that a thing stopped, and by then the ledger has a hole in it. It is also less interactive: you cannot really talk to it.
A hand-built workflow stack is more customizable, and that is a genuine advantage. It is also its problem. It becomes a machine assembled from scraps. Some good parts, some bad parts, some generic parts, all bolted together and none of it fluid.
Grok Bot is one system, same parent, same heart. Everything flows the way it should because it was built as one thing. More unified, less yours.
That tradeoff is the whole choice, and which side you want depends on whether you enjoy owning the plumbing.My Grok Bot roster as captured August 28, 2026. Named bots with standing instructions on one shared cloud machine, not a workflow canvas.What it grew into by September 10: a Chief of Staff bot that the other bots report into. I ask it one question a day.
Has Grok Bot taken a job away from Claude Code for good?
No.
That is the honest answer and I think it is the most useful sentence on this page, because it is not what a launch-week comparison would tell you.
Grok Bot did not take work off Claude Code. It picked up work that was not happening at all.
The analytics ledger did not exist before. The inbox got triaged by me, badly, or not at all.
Nothing migrated. Something new started.
The thing that makes me think that could change: Codex has genuinely surprised me lately, to the point of generating a tweet. Which makes me suspect the next Grok model might eventually take on work I currently keep on Claude. That model is not out and I am not going to pretend to know what it does.
For now: no job has moved, and I do not switch between them mid-task. I use both.
Where Claude Code actually lives
The mirror image of the roster above is that Claude Code is not a roster. It is a session in a terminal on my machine, plus Cowork as its non-terminal sibling in the desktop app.Claude Code and Cowork in the Claude desktop app. Same brain, two cockpits, both attached to my actual machine and my actual files.
And the honest caveat about the terminal: when I finally got into Claude Code it clicked immediately, but I am used to looking at a terminal window. I do not recommend that for everybody. If the terminal is the blocker rather than the capability, the fork you want is Cowork vs Claude Code, not this page.
Cost and risk, which are not symmetrical
Claude Code is included on every paid Claude tier. Pro at $20, Max 5x at $100, Max 20x at $200, per Anthropic's Max plan page and claude.com/pricing. You are not buying Claude Code, you are buying capacity for it. When you run out, it stops.
Grok Bot is included from $30 on SuperGrok, per xAI's pricing page as of September 10, 2026. Each eligible plan carries a weekly Grok Bot allowance, and overage is reported to bill from model and token cost with no Grok Bot specific spend cap yet.
That asymmetry deserves a sentence of its own. One of these fails by stopping. The other can fail by spending, unattended, at 3am. I have not been surprised by a bill, and I would still watch it closely for a first month.
There is a second risk that is structural rather than financial. All your bots share one cloud machine, along with its logins and its files.
That is convenient, and my read of it is that the bots are not meaningfully isolated from each other. Whatever one bot can log into, you have effectively handed to the whole roster. Scope what you connect accordingly.
Claude Code's risk profile is the opposite and more familiar: it is on your machine, in your files, and the blast radius is local.
Which one to start withYou want an agent doing something useful by Friday and you do not code. Grok Bot. Pick one job you do at the same time every day and hate. Not nine.
You want to build or write things and be in the loop. Claude Code, on any paid Claude plan you already have. And if the terminal is the problem, Cowork.
You are comparing coding tools specifically. Then you want Grok Build against Claude Code, not this pairing.
AI does real work in your week. Both. I do.The reason for "both" is not greed. There is no AI that does it all, and if you are running a business on this you do not want to rely on one. They get cancelled, they get rate limited, they go down, they get changed underneath you. Two vendors means one bad day is not your bad day.
If I were being properly serious about it, the most important jobs would run locally on hardware I own, with the paid frontier models sitting on top for the heavy thinking. Then a subscription change is an inconvenience rather than an outage. I am not there yet. I am running on paid models and I know that is a risk I am choosing.
The neighboring comparisons: Grok Bot vs Claude Cowork if you are choosing between the two agent products, what is Grok Bot for the week-one field test, Grok Bot use cases for the full roster and what each bot produces, and Grok vs Claude if you actually meant the models. More at Claude at Work.
Published and last reviewed September 10, 2026. The Grok Bot and Grok Build plan rows were read and captured that day from xAI's pricing page, screenshotted above. Grok Bot's VM, login and connector mechanics were verified for my week-one field test on August 28, 2026. Claude Code tier inclusion and Claude plan prices were verified for Claude Max 5x vs 20x against Anthropic's Max plan support article and claude.com/pricing. The routing rule, the repo and SSH setup, and the "no job has moved" answer are my own, from my own accounts. The overage-billing point is secondary reporting and labeled as such. A published head-to-head benchmark circulating for this pairing was left out because I could not trace it to the benchmark's own publisher.
Quick answer: these two do not compete, and every page comparing them is comparing the wrong layer. GPT-6 Astra is a model you hand hard work to. Grok Bot is a set of agents with their own computer that run standing jobs while you are asleep. I pay for both and they have never once contended for the same task.
Every result ranking for this pairing is an API aggregator: tokens per second, dollars per million, intelligence index. Useful if you are building software. Useless if you have two subscriptions and one Tuesday.
So here is the version for someone with two subscriptions and one Tuesday.
The category error, first, because it decides everythingGPT-6 Astra
Grok BotWhat it is
A model
Named persistent agentsWhere it runs
Your ChatGPT session, in Work or Codex
Its own cloud virtual machineWhose logins
Yours, in your browser
Its own, authenticated onceWhose files
Whatever you give the session
Its machine, under /workspaceWhen it works
While you are there
On a schedule, without youWhat happens at 3am
Nothing
The job runsHow it is billed
Inside your plan allowance
Weekly allowance, then reported overageRead the last two rows again. That is the entire decision.
Astra is the better thinker in this pairing. But it has never once told me something while I was doing something else.
What Astra actually ran for me
Astra shipped September 3, 2026. OpenAI describes it as state-of-the-art on computer use, browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity, science and professional work, with a context window over a million tokens.
In my week it does two things.
Research, and challenging Claude. It is genuinely good at pushing back on Fable when I want a second opinion on something I already believe. That is a real job and it is worth paying for. Smart enough that the disagreement is worth reading rather than annoying.
And this week, a game. The demos of people building games with Astra are real and I wanted in, so I spent a weekend on a Pokemon-style game. The graphics it generated genuinely stunned me. The game did not get built. Between that and my first week of running maximum effort on everything, I burned through two full allowances and produced something ugly.
That is not a knock on the model. I did not ask it the right way and the learning curve is real. But I want it next to the demo reels, because the demo reels are all successes.Astra running in ChatGPT Work on my Pro $100 account. Note the surface: on Plus, Astra appears only in Work and Codex, never in the Chat picker.
The honest cost note: at $100 I feel the ceiling for the first time. With GPT-5.6 Sol I felt it a little, but it was manageable. This is not.
If you want to build something serious with Astra, my read is you want the $200 plan. At $100 you miss out.
What Grok Bot actually ran for me
Grok Bot launched August 11, 2026. Named agents, each with standing instructions, sharing one cloud machine per account along with its logins and files.
I use it for orchestration. Analytics, publishing, intelligence, all happening in the background.
Every day, my inbox. Starting at 9am, about three times a day, a bot checks and manages it. I do not open it to triage. I open it to read what is left.
Every day, my numbers. A folder of bots scrapes my own analytics roughly three times a day and writes to a ledger. Shorts, newsletter, LinkedIn, comments. Wins and losses get logged rather than remembered. I am no longer posting blind, which sounds small and changed how I work more than any model upgrade this year.
Anything that drops in my space. A news scout watches X. Yesterday it told me OpenAI had shipped a new image generation model, and it was right that it mattered. We are now looking at integrating it into our YouTube thumbnails. That is a bot changing what I did with my afternoon.
And the sniper job. When I see a tweet I want a take on, I dump it into Grok Bot. It reads it instantly because it lives where the tweets are. Pasting that into a Claude chat is a headache. I do not want to open a terminal just for that. This is the fastest path from "interesting" to "what do you think."My account today. Inbox Hawk runs three passes a day on a routine and pings me with only what needs a human. That is the job Astra does not have a shape for.
The benchmark parity, compressed, because it should not decide this
Since somebody will ask: on Artificial Analysis, Astra and Grok 4.6 both sit at Intelligence 61. Astra's context is larger, Grok 4.6 is marginally faster, and API prices differ substantially in Grok's favor. Those are third-party figures and I am reporting them, not endorsing the methodology.
None of it should move you, for one reason: you are on a plan, not an invoice. Price per million tokens describes a bill you will never receive.
And you are not choosing between two models anyway. You are choosing between a model and an employee.
The billing asymmetry nobody prints
This is the most practical difference on this page and I have not seen it anywhere else.
ChatGPT stops you. When your allowance runs out, you wait, use a banked reset, or buy credits deliberately. The worst case is frustration.My ChatGPT meter, September 10, 2026. A ceiling, a reset date, and a $0 balance with auto-reload off. The failure mode here is that work stops.
Grok Bot bills you. Each eligible plan includes a weekly Grok Bot allowance, and extra usage is reported to be billed from model and token cost with no Grok Bot specific spend cap yet. A scheduled agent running unattended with no ceiling is a different category of risk from a subscription that simply stops.
One of these fails by stopping. The other can fail by spending. Watch the second one for a month before you trust it with a schedule.
On price itself, the record needs correcting. Grok Bot is included from SuperGrok at $30, per xAI's pricing page as of September 10, 2026.
Secondary coverage still ties it to SuperGrok Heavy bundling at around $300, and Reworked reported exactly that at launch. Whatever was true then, the page today says otherwise. It is also, notably, not listed as included on Business or Enterprise.xAI's pricing page, September 10, 2026. Grok Bot on the three individual SuperGrok tiers, and not on the two a company would buy.
If you can only pay for one
I asked myself the real version of this: if I had to cancel one tomorrow, which goes?
Astra goes. And I want to be clear that this is not a verdict on quality, because Astra is great and I would miss it and I would have to work out what to do about that.
Which sounds like it contradicts my own buying order above, and it does not. If you have neither, buy the model first, because a model is useful on day one and an agent is useful once you have taught it a job. I have already done that teaching. That is the whole difference.
Grok Bot is serving a more important purpose right now. Tracking the analytics, keeping things updated, doing the things I would otherwise not do. Losing Astra costs me a very good research partner and a sparring opponent. I would feel that. Losing Grok Bot means a category of work simply stops happening in my business.
The way I keep describing the difference: a conventional automation is like a teddy bear you have to move yourself. The moment you stop moving it, it dies. Occasionally it gets up on its own to do a boring chore, and sometimes it trips and falls and stays down. Grok Bot plays on its own, walks more smoothly, and when it falls it can get up or call one of the other bots for help.
That is a feel, not a benchmark. It is also why I would cancel the smarter one first.
So which do you buy?You mostly ask questions and want better answers. Neither of these. You want a good chat plan, and that is ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro.
You have hard, long, multi-step work. Astra, on ChatGPT. And if you intend to build something serious with it, budget the $200 tier, because $100 has a ceiling you will meet.
You have recurring jobs you do at the same time every day and resent. Grok Bot, from $30. Start with one bot, not nine.
AI does real work in your week. Both, in that order. And honestly, for a reason beyond capability: running two vendors means one closed meter does not end your day.There is no AI that does it all. If you are running a business on this, do not rely on one. If I were making real money from it, I would be on the top tier of all of them and consider it a no-brainer, because it makes the money back.
The neighboring decisions: what GPT-6 Astra actually is, which ChatGPT plans get Astra, what is Grok Bot for the week-one field test, and Grok Bot use cases for the full roster. If your comparison is really against Claude's assistant, that is Grok Bot vs Claude Cowork. More at Claude at Work.
Published September 10, 2026. Grok Bot plan inclusion was read and captured that day from xAI's pricing page, screenshotted above. Grok Bot's VM and connector mechanics were verified for my week-one field test on August 28, 2026. Astra's launch description and context window come from OpenAI's September 3 announcement as captured on September 4; OpenAI's pages could not be fetched directly on September 10 and those facts are not re-dated. The benchmark parity figures are Artificial Analysis's published index, reported as third-party. The overage-billing point is secondary reporting and labeled as such. Screenshots are my own paid accounts, sidebars cropped. Grok 4.7 is unreleased and is deliberately not discussed anywhere on this page.
Quick answer: if you do not write code, Claude Pro at $20 is almost certainly enough, and the advice telling you otherwise was written for developers. The $20 plan does not break when you ask things. It breaks when you start making things.
That distinction is the whole page. Chat, writing, research and reading documents barely move the meter. "Help me build this website" and "edit this video" move it a lot.
So before you spend the extra $80, there is a two-week test worth running. It costs nothing and it usually answers the question for you.
What you are actually buying, so we can stop guessing
The thing that makes this decision feel harder than it is: people assume Max unlocks a whole better Claude.
It mostly does not. The feature list is the same, and between Max 5x and Max 20x it is identical, which I proved row by row on Claude Max 5x vs 20x.
But there is one real gate between Pro and Max, and it would be dishonest to flatten it.Claude Pro
Claude Max 5x
Claude Max 20xPrice
$20/mo, or $17/mo billed annually
$100/mo
$200/moAnnual billing
Yes
No
NoClaude Code included
Yes
Yes
YesFable 5 and 5.1
Not in plan limits. Usage credits only
Included, up to 50% of weekly limits
Included, up to 50% of weekly limitsEverything else
Same
Same
SameWhat extra money buys
Baseline
Capacity
More capacityAnthropic's own plan matrix. The Fable row is the one place Pro and Max genuinely differ.
Since July 19, 2026, the newest model is not part of what $20 buys. You can still use it, you just pay usage credits on top. That is the honest version, and it is covered properly on is Claude Pro worth it.
So the accurate framing is: Max buys capacity, plus in-plan access to the newest model. It does not buy different features, and it does not buy a smarter Claude on the models Pro already includes.
Worth noticing the annual row too. Pro has an annual option and neither Max step does.
How the limits actually work, in one paragraph
Two clocks. A five-hour rolling session window, and a separate weekly limit that applies across all models. You need room in both.
Anthropic does not publish a message count for any tier. Every "you get 45 messages" number you have read is somebody's estimate, usually derived from a coding workload, usually with no date on it.
The full mechanics live on Claude usage limits explained. For this decision, the only thing you need is that the meter measures work done, not messages sent.
The signature of the wall
Here is the part that decides it, and I want to be precise because this is the sentence I would hand someone on the $20 plan.
You are not going to hit the limit by asking chat questions.
Where people start running out is the moment the request changes shape. "Can you help me build a website." "Can you help me edit a video." "Can you create a video." That is when you start burning real credit.
So the useful question is not "how heavy a user am I." It is: does my week contain jobs where Claude is producing an artifact over many steps, or is it mostly answering me?
If it is mostly answering you, Pro is enough. Genuinely. I say that as someone paying $200 a month who would happily take your $80.
The clearest public illustration of the other side is the Claude Max class action, where lead plaintiff Karl Kahn is reported by Engadget to have upgraded to Max 20x for heavy coding and had a single five-hour session consume 15% of his weekly quota.
Read that as workload evidence, not as a plan warning, and remember it is an allegation in a filed complaint rather than a measurement. One session, allegedly 15% of a week, on the most expensive tier available.
If it is even roughly right, it tells you what making things at volume costs. Nothing you do in a chat window comes near it.My own meters, September 5, 2026. This is a Max 20x account on a normal working day, which is the point: even heavy use looks unremarkable until the work changes shape.
The correction I would make before you spend anything
There is a mistake underneath this question that costs more than the $80, and it is thinking about it as a coding decision at all.
If you zone in on code, you get stuck on "I need to build an app" and "I need a website." Those are real use cases. Most people do need a website, and plenty of people could save money building a small app they use regularly.
But that framing hides the actual opportunity. Even if you never write a line, you should understand what code can do for you.
Say you are a video editor and you do not code. Claude can still edit and polish your videos, because underneath it is running scripts and tools rather than typing into a timeline.
I have processes running on ffmpeg and Python that edit my videos. I do not need to understand any of it. I put a video in, a polished video comes out, and I still review it.
That is the thing worth $80, if it applies to you. Not a better chatbot. Hours back.
And the numbers are not close. A simple short takes about an hour to edit properly. Fourteen of those is fourteen hours, and that is just the cutting phase.
Then there is polishing, which is roughly another fifteen. Conservatively, 20 to 30 hours on short-form alone, before you touch long-form.
I spend about 15 minutes checking them, and that is the cutting phase.
If that trade is not worth $80 to you, that is a fair position and I am not going to argue you out of it. You just want to be honest that you are still paying for it. You are paying with your time.
I am not going to relitigate the $100 case here, because it has its own page: is Claude Max worth it. The point for this decision is narrower. The thing that breaks Pro is not code. It is production.
The two-week test
So, the actual thing to do before you spend the extra $80.
Do not measure your usage. You will not learn anything from a percentage, and you will talk yourself into an upgrade you do not need.
Instead, change one habit for two weeks:Stop treating it as a chat. Once a week, hand it a job with an output, not a question. A real one from your actual work. Edit this. Build this. Process these forty files.
Route the routine work down. Do not run the most capable model on things that do not need it. This is the single biggest lever and it is free.
Start fresh sessions. A conversation you never restart forces Claude to re-read an ever-growing history every single turn. That is the most expensive habit there is, and it is a habit, not a plan problem.
Then wait for pain. Not a warning. Actual pain: stopped, mid-task, on something with a deadline, more than once.If two weeks of that never stops you, Pro was enough and you just saved $960 a year.
If it stops you repeatedly, you now know exactly what for, which is the only useful reason to upgrade.
Let the pain tell you
That is my whole rule for this ladder, and it is how I climbed it without regretting a step.
I went free, then the $20 Claude plan, then ChatGPT at $20 as well, then cancelled one because at that point it felt expensive. Back and forth for a while. Eventually $100. Eventually $200, because I kept running out of credits and got tired of waiting.
Not one of those upgrades came from a comparison table. Every one came from a wall.
The same rule governs the step above this one, and I have written out how to apply it at the $100 to $200 line on Claude Max 5x vs 20x.
The step that was clearly wrong
Since I am telling you to let pain decide, here is the one time I did not, and it cost me.
I went to an annual plan on Codex, OpenAI's coding tool, and it was too quick. I had not earned it.
Because I had committed, I spent the whole time trying to justify it, which meant burning the highest available model on every single task. When I ran Claude, I would have Codex running alongside as a sparring partner, permanently. Not because the work needed it, but because I had so much allowance that spending it felt free.
It still does that job sometimes. But now we are deliberate about which model gets which work.
The lesson is not "avoid annual." It is that buying capacity ahead of need does not just waste money. It teaches you expensive habits, and those habits are what make the next tier feel necessary too.
Which is also why I would tell anyone new to Claude to expect to be inefficient for a few weeks. You will burn far more than you need to, then you will learn the habits. Do not buy a tier to paper over a learning curve you are about to climb anyway.
The cheaper levers, in order
Before $80 a month, all of these are free or cheaper:Model routing. Run the cheap model for routine work by default. Most people have this backwards.
Session hygiene. Fresh sessions rather than dragging one bloated conversation through the whole day.
A project instructions file so you stop re-explaining yourself every session.
A second $20 subscription somewhere else instead of one $100 plan. Two providers at $20 gives you a working day when one meter closes. One provider at $100 does not. If AI does real work in your week, a single vendor is a single point of failure.So, is Pro enough?
For most people reading this: yes, and the fact that you are asking rather than being stopped is itself the answer.
The exception is not "you are a developer." It is "you have started making things, at volume, and the waiting has begun costing you real time." When that is true you will not need a blog post to tell you. You will be annoyed.
At that point the real question is not Pro versus Max, it is which Max. For non-coders, that is is Claude Max worth it.
Still deciding whether to pay at all? That is is Claude Pro worth it. The tier-by-tier gates are on Claude Pro vs Max, and the two-meter mechanics are on Claude usage limits explained. More at Claude at Work.
Published September 10, 2026. Plan prices, the annual-billing gap and the feature parity between the two Max tiers were verified for Claude Max 5x vs 20x against Anthropic's Max plan support article and claude.com/pricing. The 15%-of-a-weekly-quota figure is Engadget's reporting of an allegation in a filed complaint, linked above, not a finding and not my measurement. The meters are my own Max 20x account. The video editing hours are my own workload, not a benchmark. Anthropic publishes no message count for any tier, so this page does not quote one. I looked for non-developer accounts of hitting the Pro wall to include here and could not verify any with a real name and a live link, so that section was left out rather than filled with anonymous paraphrase.
Quick answer: Grok Bot is for standing jobs, not questions. If a task happens on a schedule, produces something you check later, and does not need files on your laptop, it belongs to a bot. If you would rather just ask and read the answer, use the chat.
Everything ranking for this query is a list of 35 or 50 hypothetical use cases assembled from launch-week hype. Useful for ideas. Nobody behind them has run one for a month.
I have. Here is my actual roster, what each job produces, the one that flopped, and the one I would cancel first.
First, the price thing, because it is wrong everywhere
The most repeated claim about Grok Bot is that it requires a $300 SuperGrok Heavy subscription. Whatever was true at launch, it is not true today, and I can show you the page.xAI's pricing page, captured September 10, 2026. "Grok Bot access" is a listed feature of the $30 SuperGrok tier.
And the feature matrix on the same page has a row that nobody has written about:Same page, same day. Read the Grok Bot row across all seven columns.
Two things fall out of that row:Grok Bot starts at $30, on SuperGrok. Not $300.
Grok Bot is not listed on Business or Enterprise. The two plans a company would actually buy are the two that do not get the agent product. Grok Build, the coding tool, is on every tier including Free. Grok Bot is not.If you are evaluating this for a team, that is the fact to check before anything else on this page.
I pay for SuperGrok Plus at $100 myself, for the headroom rather than for access.
The one-line test for whether a job belongs to a bot
Before the list, the filter I use. A job goes to a bot when all three are true:It repeats on a schedule you could write down.
It does not need files on my laptop. The bot lives on its own cloud machine.
I can check the output later instead of watching it happen.Fail any one of those and it is not a bot job. That third one is the one people skip, and it is why half the use-case lists on the internet describe things nobody could actually verify.
The three folders
I group everything into growth, publishing, and intelligence. Not because the product asks for folders, but because those are the three things I need to happen without me.My account today, September 10, 2026. Inbox Hawk runs three passes a day on a routine, then pings me with only the items that need a human. The message body is blurred because it is my actual inbox.Chief of Staff on the same day. The other bots report into it, and I ask it one question instead of reading each feed.
One mechanic worth knowing before you build a roster: every bot on your account shares one cloud virtual machine, along with its logins and its files. You authenticate once and the whole team inherits it. Durable work belongs under /workspace, because files elsewhere can disappear during recovery.
That is convenient and it is also the security story. My read of that architecture, and it is a read rather than something xAI documents: your bots are not meaningfully isolated from each other. Whatever one of them can log into, you have effectively granted to the roster. Scope what you connect accordingly.
Folder 1: Growth (the ledger)
These exist so I stop posting blind. They scrape my own analytics roughly three times a day and write to a ledger.Bot
What it doesShorts Hawk
Watches short-form performanceSubstack Hawk
Watches newsletter performancePlan Watch
Tracks changes to AI plans and pricingBank Pull
Pulls financial numbers on a scheduleComments
Tracks comments across platforms and tells me when someone is talking to meLinkedIn Hawk
Watches LinkedIn performanceAll six scrape on a schedule, roughly three to four times a day, and write what they find into a ledger.
The point of this folder is not the dashboards. It is that the wins and the losses get logged rather than felt. Before this, I was guessing about what worked from memory, which is the worst analytics system ever built.
Folder 2: PublishingBot
What it doesYouTube long-form uploader
Takes a finished video and gets it publishedSubstack Notes publisher
Posts notes without me opening the appThis is the folder that does something I genuinely could not do before. Not "did it faster." Could not do at all, because it happened at a time when I was doing something else.
Folder 3: IntelligenceBot
What it doesChief of Staff
Oversees the other bots, surfaces what mattersInbox Hawk
Checks and manages my inbox, starting at 9am, about three times a dayNews Scout
Scrapes X for anything that drops in my spaceDistribution Scout
Watches videos I follow and summarizes them my wayNews Scout is the one that changed how I work. Yesterday it told me OpenAI had shipped a new image generation model, which I agreed was a big deal, and we are now looking at integrating it into our YouTube thumbnails. That is a bot changing what I did with my afternoon.
Distribution Scout is the newest one and it has earned its keep fastest. It watches long videos for me and gives me summaries in the format I want, which is not the format any summarizer app gives you.
What is actually good about this, versus a normal automation
I have built the same kinds of jobs before with conventional workflow automation, and the difference is not capability. It is persistence.
A normal automation is a cron job wearing a costume. When it breaks, it tends to break silently, and you find out three weeks later that a thing stopped. A Grok Bot has a good enough sense of its own job that it keeps going, and when it trips, it can pick itself up or escalate.
The way I keep describing it: with a normal workflow, you have to move the thing yourself, and the moment you stop moving it, it dies. It will occasionally get up and do a boring chore, and sometimes it falls over. Grok Bot plays on its own, and when it falls it can get up, or call one of the others for help.
That is a feel, not a benchmark. But it is the reason I stopped rebuilding these as workflows.
The tradeoff is control. A hand-built workflow is customizable to its exact purpose, which is a real advantage, and also its problem: it becomes a machine assembled from scraps, some good, some generic, none of it fluid. Grok Bot is one system with one heart. More unified, less yours.
The honest part: what is not working
I would rather you get this from someone who pays for it than from a listicle.
One flopped outright. In week one I built a lead scout and it produced nothing. The product moved a boundary. It did not become magic.
Shorts Hawk is buggy. It is in the roster and it is not reliable yet.
News Scout is a little rough. Not broken, just inconsistent enough that I read its output with suspicion.
LinkedIn Hawk is the one I would kill first. If xAI doubled the price tomorrow, that is the one that goes. It is fun to watch and I could not honestly tell you what it is doing for me. Writing this page was a decent audit trigger, which is its own lesson: building the plumbing is the easy part, and then you let it run and stop asking whether it earns anything.
Chief of Staff and Inbox Hawk are the ones that stay. Inbox Hawk is not impressive and it has held up. Chief of Staff is managing everything else, which is the job I actually needed.
And the billing risk is real. Each eligible plan includes a weekly Grok Bot allowance, and extra usage is reported to be billed from model and token cost, with no Grok Bot specific spend cap yet, per eesel's pricing writeup. A scheduled agent with no ceiling is a category of risk that a fixed subscription does not have. Watch it closely for the first month.What I actually pay xAI. SuperGrok Plus, for the headroom.
What everyone else runs
The community inventories are genuinely useful for ideas, and I would rather point you at them than pretend I invented the category:Matt Van Horn's 30-day sweep of what people across X, Reddit and YouTube actually use it for.
Sid Saladi's 50-use-case inventory, the most-cited list out there.The categories that recur across the community lists generally, beyond what I run: inbox triage and cleanup, meeting prep, supplier and vendor outreach, dispatch and logistics coordination, and permit or paperwork chasing for trades businesses.
I am deliberately not retelling the individual operator stories that circulate with those lists. Several are compelling and I could not trace them to an original post I could link, so they stay off this page. If you find them, judge them yourself.
How to steal this
If you want one bot by Friday, do this:Pick the job you do at the same time every day and resent. Inbox triage, most likely.
Write the job in three sentences. If you cannot, the bot will not do it well.
Give it a schedule, not a trigger. Standing jobs beat clever ones.
Make it write somewhere you will see. A ledger, a doc, a message. Output you never read is a bot that does not exist.
Audit it in 30 days. Ask what it produced. Kill it if the answer is thin. Mine would not all survive that question, which is the point.The mistake is not building the wrong bot. It is building twelve and never asking any of them what they did.
Deciding whether the product is for you at all? What is Grok Bot is the week-one field test, Grok Bot vs Claude Cowork is the assistant comparison, Grok Bot vs Claude Code is the one for people who already run an agent, and Grok usage limits explained covers the meters. The equivalent collection on the other side is Claude Cowork use cases. More at Claude at Work.
Published September 10, 2026. The plan tiers that include Grok Bot, including its absence from Business and Enterprise, were read and captured that day from xAI's pricing page, screenshotted above. The one-VM-per-account mechanic and the connector catalog were verified for my week-one field test on August 28, 2026. The roster, the bots and the verdicts are my own paid SuperGrok Plus account. The overage-billing point is secondary reporting and is labeled as such. Community operator anecdotes I could not trace to an original source were left out rather than repeated.
Quick answer: there are two clocks and two separate pools, and OpenAI does publish numbers. Per its help center, GPT-6 Astra's estimated messages per five-hour window are 5 to 45 on Plus, 25 to 225 on Pro 5x, and 100 to 900 on Pro 20x. A weekly limit sits on top of that, and you need allowance in both to keep going.
Every page that ranks for this query copied the same leaked numbers with no date and no source. So I went and screenshotted the actual table.
The finding that matters most is not any single number. It is the ratio sitting inside the table: Astra costs you at least double what GPT-5.6 Sol costs you, at every tier.
The numbers OpenAI actually publishesOpenAI's help center article "Managing usage with GPT-6 Astra in Work and Codex," captured September 10, 2026. The page header showed it had been updated two days earlier.
The caveat OpenAI prints directly above that table deserves to be read out loud, because every page quoting these numbers drops it:The table below shows estimated local messages per five-hour period. These are not fixed message limits. Actual usage varies by task, model and settings, and weekly limits may also apply.So the honest version of "how many Astra messages do I get" is: somewhere between 5 and 45 on Plus, and which end of that range you land on is decided by what you ask it to do.
Now read the same table for the thing nobody pointed out:Model
Plus
Pro 5x
Pro 20xGPT-6 Astra
5 to 45
25 to 225
100 to 900GPT-5.6 Sol
10 to 100
50 to 500
200 to 2,000GPT-5.6 Terra
25 to 200
125 to 1,000
500 to 4,000GPT-5.6 Luna
250 to 2,000
1,250 to 10,000
5,000 to 40,000Astra is about half of Sol on every row. The bottom of each range is exactly half: 5 against 10, 25 against 50, 100 against 200. The top of each range is a little under half: 45 against 100, 225 against 500, 900 against 2,000.
That is the whole cost story in one line: the same conversation costs you at least twice as much on Astra, and up to about 2.2 times as much.
And if you drop to Luna for the routine stuff, you get roughly 45 to 50 times the messages you would get on Astra.
One thing the column headers will not tell you: Pro 5x is the $100 plan and Pro 20x is the $200 plan. OpenAI labels them by multiplier, your credit card labels them by price, and nobody maps the two for you.
Two clocks, and you need both
This is the mechanic that makes limits feel random when they are not.Same article, same capture date. The shared-pool sentence and the two-window rule, in OpenAI's own words.Depending on your plan, usage limits may apply over a five-hour window and a weekly window. Where both apply, you need allowance remaining in both to continue.The five-hour limit determines how much usage is included in each window. A new window starts when you send your first message in Work or Codex after the previous one ends. It is not a fixed clock on the wall; it starts when you do.
The weekly limit controls how much included work you get over the weekly usage period.The consequence, in OpenAI's words: "You may reach the five-hour limit before five hours have passed, even if you still have weekly usage remaining."
That is why the wall feels arbitrary. You still see plenty of weekly allowance in Settings, so you assume you are fine, and then a single heavy task closes the five-hour door.
Two pools, and Chat is not one of them
The second confusion is which meter you are draining.Surface
Pool
Who gets Astra thereChatGPT Work
Shared Work and Codex allowance
Plus, Pro, Business Standard and PremiumCodex
Same shared Work and Codex allowance
SameChatGPT Chat (as GPT-6 Pro)
Separate Chat message limits
Pro, Business, Enterprise. Not PlusOpenAI's wording: "Work and Codex share the usage allowance included with your plan." And separately: "In Chat, GPT-6 Pro is powered by Astra and is available on eligible Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. Its message limits are separate from the shared Work and Codex allowance and vary by plan."
So running Astra hard in Codex does not eat your Chat allowance. It does eat your Work allowance, because those two are the same bucket.
One more rule that catches people mid-task: "Switching models does not restore allowance in a shared usage pool." Dropping from Astra to Luna after you have hit the wall does not open the door. It only slows the next burn.
The setting that matters more than the model
Here is the paragraph I think is the most valuable thing OpenAI has published about Astra, and it is filed under a settings heading where nobody will read it.Same article, same capture date. Read the bolded sentence twice.Lower effort does not mean lower capability across models. For example, Astra at Low effort can outperform Sol at High effort. If you've been getting good results with Sol at High, try Astra at Low or Medium as a starting point.And the warning attached to the top setting:Higher effort can use more of your allowance and does not always produce a better result.If you take one action from this page, it is that one. If Astra feels like it is draining you, check whether you are running maximum effort on tasks that never needed it. That was my problem.
My own advice lands in roughly the same place. The way I put it: use the top setting to plan the hard thing, then drop down to execute it. I hedge on how far down, somewhere between low and high, because I genuinely do not know.
The reasoning earns its price during planning. During execution it usually does not.
Did OpenAI cut the limits in September?
You will find headlines saying allowances were cut by up to 4x for heavy users, and you will find OpenAI saying Astra consumes 3 to 4 times less subscription usage on long-tail workloads. Both claims are circulating in the same week.
I am not going to pick the scarier one. I did not capture the old table, so I cannot show you a before and after, and neither can any of the pages ranking for this query.
What I can show you is the table as it stands today, which is above, and the ratio inside it: Astra is priced against your plan at somewhere between two and two and a bit times GPT-5.6 Sol. If your allowance feels like it evaporated after the rollout, that ratio is a sufficient explanation on its own. You did not need a secret cut to burn twice as fast. You just needed to start using the new model for everything, which is exactly what everyone did.
I certainly did. My first week I ran maximum effort on questions that did not deserve it.
Resets, including the ones OpenAI handed out
There are three kinds, and they behave differently.
Banked resets. Saved to your account until used or expired. Per OpenAI: "A full banked reset refreshes your five-hour and weekly Work and Codex limits and changes your weekly reset date." You use one from Settings then Usage in the desktop app, where it shows up as something like "1 reset available" or "Full reset."
Automatic or global resets. Applied for you, announced by OpenAI, and they do not appear as a saved reset in Settings.
Purchased instant resets. Available to eligible personal Plus and Pro accounts depending on billing country. They refresh immediately at checkout, cannot be saved, and they pull your whole weekly period forward: your new week starts at your next Work or Codex request, and the next automatic weekly reset is seven days after that.
That last mechanic is worth understanding before you buy one in a panic. You are not adding allowance to this week. You are starting next week early.
And the launch giveaway was real, which is why so many people had spare resets in early September:The launch reset schedule, in OpenAI's own words. Captured September 10, 2026.
Three separate grants: banked resets on September 3 and September 4, and an automatic refresh on September 7 that did not bank anything. OpenAI attributes them to "the broader Astra launch delay," and states that individual access problems after launch do not earn you another one.
Also worth knowing before you get your hopes up: "A reset restores your allowance. It does not permanently increase your plan's limits or change how much allowance a task uses."
What a real meter looks like
Here is my own account today. ChatGPT Pro at $100 a month.My Settings then Usage and billing pane, captured September 10, 2026. Sidebar cropped.
Reading it left to right, because this is what the pages quoting leaked numbers cannot give you:Weekly usage limit: 68% left, resets September 16. That is six days of runway on a meter that read 30% left five days earlier, before the September 7 automatic reset landed.
Credits balance: $0, automatic reload off. No hidden top-up propping this up.
One banked "Full reset" left, expiring October 5. That is what remains of the launch giveaway.On a heavy prompt I can watch five to ten percent of that meter disappear at once. Not over a session. On one prompt.The same pane five days earlier, September 5, 2026: 30% left, resetting September 7. That September 7 reset is the automatic one OpenAI documents above.
I have burned two full resets since Astra shipped. The first one was pure stupidity: I ran the highest effort setting on everything because it was new. The second went to a weekend attempt at building a game, which ate an entire allowance and produced something ugly.
I have not hit a wall since. Partly because I had banked resets to fall back on rather than sitting and waiting, and partly because I stopped spending like that.
What to do when you actually hit it
In order, and be honest with yourself at step one:Check which clock stopped you. Settings then Usage tells you. If it is the five-hour window and your weekly meter is healthy, you are not in trouble, you are just early.
Wait, if the job can wait. Five hours is not a crisis. Most jobs can wait five hours.
Move the job down a model, not sideways. Luna gives you roughly 45 to 50 times the messages of Astra. Most of what you were doing did not need Astra.
Spend a banked reset if you have one and the deadline is real. Check the expiry first.
Move the job to another tool. This is the one nobody says out loud. I run Claude and Grok Bot alongside ChatGPT, and when one meter closes I do not sit and stare at it. Grok Bot in particular has been generous with resets.That last point is the real answer to "how do I stop hitting limits," and it is not a limits answer. There is no AI that does it all, and if you are running a business on this you should not rely on one. A single subscription is a single point of failure.
The one-line version
Two clocks, two pools, and Astra costs at least double GPT-5.6 Sol per message. Turn your effort setting down before you turn your spending up.
Comparing the meters across vendors? Claude usage limits explained and Grok usage limits explained are the same breakdown for the other two. If you are deciding between the $100 and $200 ChatGPT tiers, that is ChatGPT Pro $100 vs $200, and what GPT-6 Astra actually is covers the naming. More at Claude at Work.
Published and last reviewed September 10, 2026. Every allowance number, the two-window mechanic, the Work-versus-Chat pool split, the effort-level guidance, the reset types and the launch reset schedule were read and captured that day from OpenAI's help center article "Managing usage with GPT-6 Astra in Work and Codex," screenshotted above.
The reported September allowance cut and OpenAI's long-tail efficiency claim are both secondary reporting and are labeled as unverified in the text. I did not capture the previous table and cannot show a before and after. The meters are my own paid Pro account with the sidebar cropped, on two dates five days apart. OpenAI's figures are estimated ranges, not entitlements.
Quick answer: GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's most capable model, released September 3, 2026, with a context window over one million tokens. It is a model, not a new app. And there is a good chance the word "Astra" does not appear anywhere in your ChatGPT, which is not a bug in your account so much as a naming decision.
I pay $100 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When I opened the model list today to write this page, Astra was not in it.
More on that in a minute, because it turns out to be the most useful thing on this page.
What it is, without the benchmark table
Astra is the model OpenAI now points at its hardest work. From OpenAI's launch post: "state-of-the-art on computer use, browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity, science, and professional work," with a context window of more than one million tokens.
OpenAI's own help center is blunter about when to reach for it. It calls Astra "Our most capable model for coding, research, analysis, and complex problem-solving," and the examples it gives are investigating a difficult bug and working through an unfamiliar problem.
Read that list again as a normal person. It is not "answers your questions better." It is: reads a lot, goes and does things, sticks with a hard problem.
That is the honest one-line version. Astra is for the jobs that take a while.
For me it is research and a sparring partner. It is genuinely good at pushing back on Claude Fable when I want a second opinion on something I already believe, and it is smart enough that the pushback is worth reading. I have also started using it to build a game, which I will get to.
What I do not open it for is my daily content work. That still goes to Fable, because that is the one that feels like a partner rather than a very good search.
One model, three names
This is the part that turns a five-minute question into a forty-minute one, and nobody explains it.Where you are
What it is called thereChatGPT Work, and Codex (the developer surface, ignore it if you do not code)
GPT-6 AstraThe ChatGPT Chat tab
GPT-6 ProThe API
gpt-6-astraOpenAI's help center states the split directly: "In Chat, GPT-6 Pro is powered by Astra and is available on eligible Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. Its message limits are separate from the shared Work and Codex allowance and vary by plan. Plus includes Astra in Work and Codex, but not GPT-6 Pro in Chat."
So if you are on Plus, hunting the Chat model picker for the word "Astra," you will hunt forever. It was never going to be there.
Here is my own Chat picker on the $100 Pro plan a few days ago. No Astra anywhere in it.My own Chat picker, captured September 5, 2026, on ChatGPT Pro at $100 a month. The model is in the account. The name is not in the list.
Why you cannot find it, in the order worth checking
Now the live one. This is my Work tab today, September 10, with the model list open.My Work model list on September 10, 2026, on a Pro plan that is entitled to Astra. Default, 5.6 Sol, 5.6 Terra, 5.6 Luna, 5.5, 5.3 Codex Spark. No Astra.
I am not showing you that to claim OpenAI pulled the model. I am showing it because it is the single most common thing that happens to real people in week two, and OpenAI documents the fix in its own help center under a heading called "Update your ChatGPT desktop app."
Their instruction, which is more specific than the usual "try restarting":If Astra is missing, check for updates even if you recently installed one. Your app may need another update and a full restart.OpenAI's help center, captured September 10, 2026. A three-step procedure that exists because this happens to a lot of people.
So the checklist, in the order that actually resolves it:Update the desktop app, then fully quit and reopen. Then check for updates again. OpenAI explicitly says a second round may be needed.
Check which tab you are in. Work and Codex offer Astra by name. Chat offers GPT-6 Pro instead.
Check your plan against the surface. Plus gets Astra in Work and Codex only.Worth saying plainly: my app had crashed to an error screen minutes before I took that shot, and the recovery still came back without Astra listed. Updating is a real step, not a brush-off.The state my app was in shortly before the model list above, September 10, 2026. Note which button OpenAI puts first.
When it is there, it looks like this. Same account, five days earlier, running a real job in Work:The same account on September 5, with the Work composer chip reading GPT-6 Astra Ultra. Third name, same model.
Do you have it? The short versionFree: no.
Plus: yes, in Work and Codex. Not in the Chat picker.
Pro $100 and Pro $200: yes, in Work and Codex, plus GPT-6 Pro in Chat.
Business and Enterprise: yes, with seat-level rules.I am deliberately not rebuilding the full surface-by-plan table here, because it already exists: which ChatGPT plans get Astra is the page for that question. This one is about what the thing is.
The part nobody warns you about: it eats your plan
Astra burns your included usage fast. I am on the $100 plan and I have already burned through two full resets.
That is not a vibe. OpenAI publishes estimated messages per five-hour window, and on every plan tier Astra's range is about half of GPT-5.6 Sol's. Same messages, at least twice the burn. The full table and the two clocks behind it are on GPT-6 Astra usage limits explained.
The number worth carrying around: on Plus, the bottom of OpenAI's own estimated range for Astra is five messages in a five-hour window. So "a couple of messages" is genuinely the right mental model for a heavy Astra session.
Which is why the setting nobody touches matters more than the model you pick. OpenAI's guidance here surprised me, and it is worth quoting:Lower effort does not mean lower capability across models. For example, Astra at Low effort can outperform Sol at High effort. If you've been getting good results with Sol at High, try Astra at Low or Medium as a starting point.OpenAI's help center, captured September 10, 2026. The most useful paragraph OpenAI published about Astra, and it is buried under a settings heading.
I had heard that claim secondhand and half believed it. It is real, and it is in their documentation.
My own rule lands in the same place from the other direction. In my words: use the top setting to plan the hard thing, then drop down to execute it. I hedged on how far down, somewhere between low and high, because I genuinely do not know.
Planning is where the reasoning earns its cost. Execution mostly is not. Mapping my "top setting" onto OpenAI's effort control is my reading, not their instruction.
The full mechanics of the two clocks and three pools are in GPT-6 Astra usage limits explained.
What people are actually building with it
The word-of-mouth is not benchmark tables. It is people posting what they made. These are the ones that made me open the model picker, with the original posts linked so you can judge the source yourself.Tom Krcha gave Astra an old drawing of a steam train and asked for it in Blender. His post says it came back as 3,295 editable objects in a few minutes. Original post on X.Roberto Nickson fed it nine phone photos of his studio. It worked out the spatial layout and returned a walkable 3D model. Original post on X.
Three more worth your time, no screenshots because they are threads and video:KP's roundup of the early demos, compiled the day after launch with credit to each builder. The fastest way to see the range.
Min Choi's ten examples: games, 3D scenes, character models, all from prompts or images.
Riley Brown's take: his biggest moment was not visual at all. He gave Astra context on his whole business and let it plan. That matches my own use more than the game clips do.One caveat on all of it. Every one of these people is on a Pro or Business plan or the API. None of them are doing this on the $20 plan, and the next section is why.
The game thing, honestly
The hype about people building games with Astra is real. I have seen shooters. I wanted in, so I spent a weekend trying to build a Pokemon-style game with it.
The graphics it generated genuinely stunned me. These looked different.Three screens Astra generated for me over the weekend of September 6. Original creatures, original names, a battle system and an overworld. This is what "impressive graphics" meant.
The game did not get built. It burned two full usage resets and what I ended up with was ugly.
I am fairly sure that is me, not the model. I did not ask the computer the right way, and the learning curve is a real curve. But I want that on the record next to the demo videos, because the demo videos are all successes and the honest week-two experience includes an expensive failure.
If you want to build something serious with it, my read is you want the $200 plan. At $100 you feel the ceiling, and I never felt it with GPT-5.6 Sol.
What I would do this week
If you are on Plus: open the Work tab, not Chat, and give it one hard thing you have been avoiding. A long document you never read, a mess you have not untangled. That is the shape of task Astra is for. Do not burn it on questions.
If you are on Pro: try the thing OpenAI suggests and drop your effort setting a notch. You may find you were paying double for reasoning you did not need.
And if you cannot find it at all, update the app twice before you conclude anything about your plan.
Astra is a real step up on hard, long, multi-step work. It is not a better chatbot, and treating it like one is the fastest way to spend a month's allowance on a Tuesday.
Working out which subscription this affects? Which ChatGPT plans get Astra has the surface table, GPT-6 Astra vs Claude Fable 5.1 has the benchmark read, and GPT-6 Astra vs Grok Bot covers the model-versus-teammate question. More of how I run all of this at Claude at Work.
Published September 10, 2026. The effort-level guidance, the Chat-versus-Work split and the update procedure were read and captured that day from OpenAI's help center article "Managing usage with GPT-6 Astra in Work and Codex," and the two screenshots of it above are from that capture. The allowance figures are summarized here and screenshotted in full on the limits post linked above. The launch description and context window come from OpenAI's September 3 announcement, cited as of September 4 when this site first captured it. The account screenshots are my own paid Pro plan, sidebar cropped. My missing-Astra screenshot documents one account on one day and one app build. It is not a claim about OpenAI's rollout.
Weekly drop
Get the field manual.
One automation system every Tuesday. Zero fluff. Just workflows you can steal.
You're in!
The 15 prompts are on their way. After that, one short Ship Lean note every Tuesday.
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