Grok 4.5 pricing
$2.00 per million input tokens, $6.00 per million output. 500K token context window. Read from xAI’s own documentation on August 5, 2026.
- Input
- $2.00 per 1M tokens
- Cached input
- $0.3000 15% of base
- Output
- $6.00 3.0× input
- Context window
- 500K verified
- Token counting
- Estimate o200k_base
- Price verified
- 2026-08-05 today
Rates shown are for prompts under 200K tokens. Above that threshold xAI charges double on every line: $4.00 input, $0.60 cached, $12.00 output.
Source: xAI pricing documentation. Prices change without notice — verify before committing spend.
What Grok 4.5 costs on real work
Four workload shapes at 100,000 requests a month. The point of showing four is that the ranking between models changes depending on which one describes you.
| Workload | In | Out | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ClassificationShort input, one-word answer. Input-dominated. | 500 | 50 | $0.001300 | $130.00 |
| Chat turnA system prompt plus a few turns of history. | 1,500 | 300 | $0.004800 | $480.00 |
| Document summaryA long document in, a paragraph out. | 20,000 | 800 | $0.0448 | $4,480.00 |
| Code generationOutput-heavy — where output pricing dominates. | 2,000 | 1,500 | $0.0130 | $1,300.00 |
Put your own numbers in the cost calculator, or measure a real prompt first in the token counter. If your requests share a stable prefix, the cached rate applies to most of your input — check the structure in the cache checker.
Counting tokens for Grok 4.5
xAI does not publish a tokenizer that runs in a browser, so any pre-flight count for Grok 4.5 is an estimate rather than a measurement.
xAI does not publish a client-side tokenizer. Counted with o200k_base and scaled slightly; the direction of the error is known but not its size, so treat this as an order-of-magnitude figure rather than a count.
Treat it as accurate to within roughly ten to twenty percent. That is fine for budgeting and wrong for sizing a prompt right at a context window boundary — where precision matters, use xAI’s own token counting endpoint from your backend. The methodology page sets out every scaling factor used here.
Other xAI models
The tier question: is a cheaper model in the same family enough for your task?
| Model | Input | Output | Context | Chat turn |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grok 4.5 — this page | $2.00 | $6.00 | 500K | $0.004800 |
| Grok 4.3 | $1.25 | $2.50 | 1M | $0.002625 |
| Grok Build 0.1 | $1.00 | $2.00 | 256K | $0.002100 |
Alternatives from other providers
Models priced nearest to Grok 4.5, not the cheapest on the market — those are the ones actually worth evaluating against it.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does Grok 4.5 cost?
- $2.00 per million input tokens and $6.00 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.3000 per million. On a typical chat turn of 1,500 input and 300 output tokens that is $0.004800 per request, or $480.00 per month at 100,000 requests. Read from xAI's own documentation on August 5, 2026.
- Can I count Grok 4.5 tokens exactly?
- No. xAI does not publish a tokenizer that runs in a browser, so any pre-flight count for Grok 4.5 is an estimate. xAI does not publish a client-side tokenizer. Counted with o200k_base and scaled slightly; the direction of the error is known but not its size, so treat this as an order-of-magnitude figure rather than a count. Treat it as accurate to within roughly ten to twenty percent and never as the basis for sizing a prompt right at a context window boundary.
- What is the context window of Grok 4.5?
- 500,000 tokens. That budget covers everything in the request — system prompt, conversation history, tool definitions, documents — plus the response itself, not just your input.
- Why is output more expensive than input on Grok 4.5?
- Output costs 3.0 times input here. Input is processed in a single parallel pass, while output is generated one token at a time with a full pass over the model for each. That is why a model that answers concisely can be cheaper in production than one with a lower headline rate.