Grok 4 token cost & pricing
Grok 4 from xAI is a frontier reasoning model with a 256K context window and native access to real-time web information. Pricing is $3 per million input and $15 per million output — matching Claude Sonnet 4.5 exactly.
Grok 4 specifications
| Vendor | xAI |
|---|---|
| Input price | $3 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $15 / 1M tokens |
| Context window | 256,000 tokens |
| Max output | 32,768 tokens |
| Open weights | No |
| Price rank | 16 of 17 (cheapest first) |
| Best for | reasoning, realtime |
What Grok 4 costs in practice
Four common workloads, priced at list rates. Monthly figures assume 30 days.
| Workload | Per request | Requests/day | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chatbot · 1K in / 500 out | $0.01 | 10,000 | $3,150 |
| RAG Q&A · 8K in / 400 out | $0.03 | 5,000 | $4,500 |
| Doc summary · 30K in / 1K out | $0.10 | 1,000 | $3,150 |
| Code agent · 60K in / 3K out | $0.22 | 500 | $3,375 |
How many requests does $100 buy?
Assuming a 1,000-token prompt and a 500-token response per request.
How Grok 4 pricing actually works
Identical to Sonnet 4.5 on both axes with no cached-input tier published at the same discount level, which means the decision between them should be made on capability and ecosystem rather than price.
When to use Grok 4
The differentiator is recency: tasks that depend on information newer than any training cutoff, like current-events analysis or live market commentary. For static knowledge tasks it offers no cost advantage over Sonnet.
How to cut your Grok 4 bill
Because real-time access encourages long, context-heavy prompts, cap how much web context you inject per call. Fetching ten pages when two suffice is the most common source of runaway Grok costs.
Cheaper alternatives to Grok 4
- GPT-4oOpenAI31% cheaper
- GPT-5OpenAI38% cheaper
- Gemini 2.5 ProGoogle38% cheaper
- Mistral Large 2Mistral56% cheaper
Run the numbers on your own prompt
Paste your actual text into the token counter to get an exact count instead of an estimate. Nothing is uploaded.
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