Thought Leadership
Elon Musk has reached an important milestone for his AI company xAI: the in-house language model Grok 3 is now available as an API.
The xAI team offers developers two different model variants: The full Grok 3 and a more compact version called Grok 3 Mini. Both are to be equipped with special “reasoning” functionalities.
Pricing is based on the token model: for the main Grok 3 model, 3 US dollars are charged per million tokens processed (equivalent to around 750,000 words), while each million tokens generated costs 15 US dollars. The mini version is considerably cheaper at 0.30 US dollars for incoming and 0.50 US dollars for outgoing token millions.
For particularly time-critical applications, xAI offers accelerated versions of both models. These cost correspondingly more: 5 US dollars (input) and 25 US dollars (output) per million tokens for the main model and 0.60 US dollars (input) and 4 US dollars (output) for the mini version.
The price structure of Grok 3 places the model in the upper market segment. The exact match with the prices of Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet is particularly striking. Compared to Google’s new Gemini 2.5 Pro, however, Grok 3 is more expensive.
In technical terms, it is noticeable that the API implementation with a context window of 131,072 tokens (around 97,500 words) falls well short of the original announcements. At its launch in February, xAI had advertised an impressive limit of one million tokens.
