Grok

Grok is the chat assistant built by xAI, Elon Musk's AI company. It lives both inside X (formerly Twitter) and as a standalone product at grok.com, and it is known for a looser, more opinionated conversational style than most rivals, plus tight access to real-time posts on X.

The flagship model is Grok 4.3 (Beta), which became the default in April 2026. It added native video input, pushed its knowledge cutoff to December 2025, and improved tool-calling. xAI has announced Grok 4.5 for public release on July 9, 2026, pitched as an "Opus-class" model built on a new 1.5-trillion-parameter V9 foundation and trained partly on Cursor coding data.

On capabilities, Grok handles text chat, image and video understanding, web and X search, and image/video generation through Grok Imagine. Developers can also reach the models through the xAI API.

Pricing spans a wide ladder. The free tier is $0 and now runs a lighter Grok 4 Mini, text only, capped at roughly 10 prompts every 2 hours. Paid options include X Premium at $8/mo, SuperGrok Lite at $10/mo, SuperGrok at $30/mo (or $300/yr, about 17% off), X Premium+ at $40/mo, and SuperGrok Heavy at $300/mo. The API (grok-4.3) costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens.

The main limitation is the free tier, which was tightened in March 2026: image and video generation were removed from it and it only runs Grok 4 Mini with a tight prompt cap. Getting the full flagship experience and Grok Imagine requires a paid plan.

Grok suits people already active on X who want an assistant wired into live posts, users who like a more candid tone, and developers who want a competitively priced API. Anyone who needs the newest model or heavy image/video generation should expect to pay.