In this article
- 1 Quick decision
- 2 Three of the seven rungs carry a price
- 3 Every free-tier limit number on Google describes a system that died in June
- 4 The free plan can build you a working website
- 5 What free actually gets you, row by row
- 6 What the $30 buys, and the buried line is Grok Bot
- 7 I pay $100, and I did not buy it for the chat
- 8 One trigger per rung
- 9 Two gotchas that cost people money
- 10 Where this fits
Which plan should you buy? Tap 3, get the verdict
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 decision
| Your situation | Rung |
|---|---|
| Questions, current news, real-time search | Free, $0 |
| You want a working page or app built for you | Free. Build is on every plan |
| You want still images | xAI’s table checks Free. The details |
| You want video or Expert mode | SuperGrok Lite already has both. Price unpublished |
| You want a bot running on a schedule | SuperGrok, $30 |
| You will run bots daily and hammer the meter | SuperGrok Plus, $100. My verdict |
| You saw a price for Lite or Heavy in a blog | Verify it. xAI prints neither |
Three of the seven rungs carry a price
xAI’s pricing page, captured September 10, 2026. Three cards, three numbers.
| Plan | Published price | What defines it |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Real-time web and X search (limited), voice mode, connectors |
| SuperGrok Lite | Not published | A column in the table with no number |
| SuperGrok | $30 | The cheapest published rung with Grok Bot access |
| SuperGrok Plus | $100 | Everything above, plus 1080p video and much higher usage |
| SuperGrok Heavy | Not published | A column in the table with no number |
| Business | Not published | Team seats, RBAC, consolidated billing |
| Enterprise | Not published | Contact sales, custom RBAC |
Four of the seven columns carry no price. That is not an oversight you should paper over with a number you found on an affiliate site, so this page will keep saying “not published” where xAI says nothing.
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 row
Read the Free column straight down. September 10, 2026.
| Row | Free | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.6 | Yes | Same headline model as the paid tiers |
| Image generation (Imagine) | Yes | Stills are in |
| Video generation | No | This is the first real wall |
| Grok Build | Yes | Websites and apps, published to a link |
| Grok Bot | No | Standing jobs need $30 |
| Real-time web + X search | Limited | The good part, rationed |
| Expert | No | No longer-thinking mode |
Worth 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 chat
My 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 it |
|---|---|
| Free, $0 | Questions, news and real-time search, plus building a page you can publish |
| SuperGrok Lite | It exists between Free and $30 and adds video and Expert. Price not published, so price it before you assume |
| SuperGrok, $30 | You want Grok Bot, or you outgrow the usage fast |
| SuperGrok Plus, $100 | You are running bots daily and babysitting a meter is costing you more than $70 |
| SuperGrok Heavy | You want the swarm-of-agents mode. Price not published; treat any figure as unconfirmed |
The 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.
Do not buy a rung for a number you read. Lite and Heavy have no published price. If a page quotes you one, that page is guessing, and this is a product whose plan gating changed twice in six weeks. Check xAI’s pricing page on the day you buy, 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.
Plan-change alerts
I read the AI pricing pages so you don't have to.
Get one short email the day any plan on the tracker changes price or limits — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, Perplexity. The kind of change I catch: Fable 5 quietly leaving Claude Pro's plan limits, Copilot Pro's consumer plan disappearing — both documented and dated on this tracker's changelog. No schedule, no filler: a change happens, you hear about it.
Written by
Chris AlarconChris Alarcon builds Ship Lean: the boring Claude and AI setups that actually work, handed to people who don’t code. He runs his one-person operation on these systems, around a full-time job, and shares every workflow, prompt, and tool combo in public. Start with the 15 prompts he uses every day.
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