Musk is giving all X Premium subscribers access to Grok
Elon Musk just announced that xAI's Grok chatbot will roll out to all X Premium subscribers later this week, halving the barrier to entry from the $16 per month Premium+ tier down to $8. Facing shrinking active users and advertiser flight, X is leveraging its spicy, real-time AI to supercharge paid subscriptions.
Musk just slashed the price of admission for Grok by half.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk announced that xAI’s Grok chatbot will be enabled for all X Premium subscribers later this week, expanding well beyond the high-tier Premium+ crowd.
Halving the paywall while traffic slips
Until now, chatting with Grok meant shelling out $16 a month or $168 a year for Premium+. Opening it up to standard Premium users drops the entry fee to $8 a month, or $84 a year.
The timing speaks volumes. X has been fighting an uphill battle to keep users around. According to Sensor Tower data reported by NBC News, U.S. usage on X was down 18% year-over-year in February, and down 23% since Musk took over.
Meanwhile, Meta's Threads crossed 130 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2023, while alternatives like Bluesky continue pulling users away. To make matters worse, 75 of X's top 100 U.S. advertisers from October 2022 have pulled their spend entirely.
What Grok actually brings to the table
Earlier this month, xAI open-sourced the original Grok model and quickly followed up with details on Grok-1.5, boasting improved math and coding benchmarks alongside a massive 128,000 token context window.
Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, Grok leans into what Musk calls a rebellious streak, tackling taboo topics and conspiracy discussions that other chatbots flat-out refuse to touch.
More importantly, Grok plugs straight into real-time X data, giving it immediate awareness of breaking events. Rumors also suggest an upcoming Analysis feature designed to summarize long threads and replies directly in the feed.
Why it matters
Bundling a capable LLM into an $8 monthly social subscription puts real pressure on the AI pricing landscape.
For consumers, it makes Grok arguably the cheapest way to access a frontier-style chatbot, especially compared to the $20 monthly fees demanded by ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. If you already spend hours scrolling X, it is a fun and snappy tool for tracking live events, even if its freewheeling tone makes it less suited for serious enterprise work.
From our perspective, bundling Grok is a clever attempt to prop up subscription numbers as ad dollars dry up. But there is a glaring catch: Grok’s biggest differentiator is its access to live X conversations. If the platform continues to bleed active users, the very data that makes Grok unique will quietly lose its edge.
Sources (1)
- techcrunch.com(opens in a new tab)Originaltechcrunch.com