Grok 3 API Pricing
Grok 3 costs $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens on xAI's API. Cached input is billed at $1.54 per 1M tokens. Prices are provider list prices in USD, refreshed as sources update; see the Grok 3 model profile for capability scores.
Price List
| Rate | Price (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $3.00 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $15.00 | per 1M tokens |
| Cached input (read) | $1.54 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended input + output | $18.00 | 1M in + 1M out at list price |
What a Workload Costs
Computed straight from the list prices above — token counts are illustrative workload sizes, not measurements of Grok 3.
| Workload | Cost | Tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Short chat turn | $0.011 | 1K in / 500 out |
| Summarize a long document | $0.330 | 100K in / 2K out |
| Agentic coding session | $3.00 | 500K in / 100K out |
| 1M input + 1M output tokens | $18.00 | 1M in / 1M out |
Effective Cost
In AI IQ's scoring, Grok 3's list price is adjusted by a token-usage multiplier of 0.181 (measured from real benchmark runs), giving an effective cost of $3.26 per 1M input + output tokens. That places it #53 of 117 models on the effective-cost ranking (lower is cheaper). Some models spend far more tokens than others on the same task, so effective cost compares what a unit of work really costs. Method details are on the methodology page; see all models on the cost charts and the falling cost of intelligence over time.
Cheaper Alternatives at Similar Capability
Models with a lower effective cost that score within a few IQ points of Grok 3 (IQ 88), or better.
| Model | Provider | IQ | Effective Cost / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| mimo-v2.5-pro | Xiaomi | 116 | $1.80 |
| gemini-3-flash | 116 | $2.74 | |
| qwen3.7-plus | Alibaba | 115 | $1.67 |
| grok-4.3 | xAI | 115 | $2.60 |
| glm-5.1 | Z.ai | 114 | $3.14 |
| deepseek-v4-flash | DeepSeek | 113 | $1.39 |