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Grok 4.20 API Pricing

Grok 4.20 has tracked API rates of $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens. Cached input is billed at $0.2 per 1M tokens. Rates are in USD from the AI IQ dataset; see the Grok 4.20 model profile for capability scores.

Input / 1M
$2.00
Output / 1M
$6.00
Effective / 1M I/O
$5.11
Cost Rank
#84

Price List

RatePrice (USD)Notes
Input$2.00per 1M tokens
Output$6.00per 1M tokens
Cached input (read)$0.2per 1M tokens
Blended input + output$8.001M in + 1M out at list price

Pricing References and Billing Caveats

These are the tracked rates, not a live quote. Hosted-provider choice, region, long-context tiers, caching, batch discounts, and temporary promotions can change the actual bill. Open-weight availability does not mean hosted inference is free. Workload examples assume the listed standard input and output rates, with no cache hits or discounts.

xAI pricing catalog — check current offerings and rate tiers. This catalog may not list historical models or third-party hosted endpoints.

No model-specific official reference is recorded for this entry. Confirm the current rates directly with your inference provider.

What a Workload Costs

Computed straight from the list prices above — token counts are illustrative workload sizes, not measurements of Grok 4.20.

WorkloadCostTokens
Short chat turn$0.005001K in / 500 out
Summarize a long document$0.212100K in / 2K out
Agentic coding session$1.60500K in / 100K out
1M input + 1M output tokens$8.001M in / 1M out

Effective Cost

In AI IQ's scoring, Grok 4.20's list price is adjusted by a token-usage multiplier of 0.639 (measured from real benchmark runs), giving an effective cost of $5.11 per 1M input + output tokens. That places it #84 of 153 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 4.20 (IQ 111), or better.

ModelProviderIQEffective Cost / 1M
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017DeepSeek127$3.24
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek126$1.87
gpt-6-lunaOpenAI125$0.7693
mimo-v2.6-proXiaomi125$1.52
gpt-5.6-lunaOpenAI124$1.63
mimo-v2.6-flashXiaomi122$0.6897

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