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Chris Alarcon - 10 Sep, 2026
Grok Free vs SuperGrok: What You Actually Get Without Paying (2026)
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.
