24 September 2026 · AI & LLMs · 5 min read
Every LLM API I've priced on this site bills tokens the same way a utility bills electricity: you pay for what you used, and the rate for token #1 doesn't change because you also used token #500,000. Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.7 don't work like that. I pulled xAI's own pricing docs (docs.x.ai/developers/pricing) and found a threshold: the moment a prompt hits 200,000 tokens, xAI doesn't bill the extra tokens at a higher rate — it reclassifies the entire request, input and output and cached tokens all at once, at exactly double the price. Cross the line by one token and the bill for everything you sent, not just the overage, jumps 2x. I ran a real agent workload across that line to see what it costs.
| Prompt size | Вход | Cached input | Выход |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 200,000 tokens | $2.00 | $0.50 | $6.00 |
| At or over 200,000 tokens | $4.00 | $1.00 | $12.00 |
That's per million tokens, and it applies identically to Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.7 — both ship a 500K-token context window and both use this same two-tier structure. There's also a US regional endpoint, the only one both models are available on, billed at a flat 1.1x on top of whichever tier you land in: $2.20/$0.55/$6.60 under the line, $4.40/$1.10/$13.20 over it. Every other API I've priced here — Gemini's Flash discount, GPT-6 Astra's Fast/Batch split, Claude's cache tiers — changes the rate for a slice of usage. Grok's 200K mark changes the rate for the whole request, retroactively, based on a number you don't always control precisely (a growing conversation history, a longer retrieved-context chunk, one more attached document).
Take one call: a 190,000-token prompt (a long document plus instructions) generating a 6,000-token response.
| Prompt size | Входная стоимость | Выходная стоимость | Общий | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under the cliff | 190,000 in / 6,000 out | $0.380 | $0.036 | $0.416 |
| Over the cliff | 210,000 in / 6,000 out | $0.840 | $0.072 | $0.912 |
The prompt grew 10.5%. The bill grew 119%. That's not a rounding effect of a bigger number times the same rate — the per-token rate itself doubled the instant the prompt crossed 200,000, on every token in the request, not just the 20,000 that pushed it over.
A coding-agent or long-document pipeline running 10,000 requests a month, each averaging 195,000 prompt tokens with a 5,000-token response — comfortably under the line today.
| Avg. prompt | Per-request cost | Monthly (10,000 reqs) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Today, avg. 195K | 195,000 in / 5,000 out | $0.420 | $4,200 |
| Next month, avg. 205K | 205,000 in / 5,000 out | $0.880 | $8,800 |
A 5% creep in average prompt length — the kind that happens quietly as a system prompt grows, a few more few-shot examples get added, or conversation history isn't trimmed as aggressively — adds $4,600 a month, a 110% increase, with zero change in request volume or model choice. Route that same average-205K workload through the US regional endpoint instead of global and it's $9,680/mo, another $880 for the regional guarantee on top of an already-doubled rate.
If you're building on Grok 4.6 or 4.7 and your prompts sit anywhere near 150K-200K tokens, treat 200,000 as a hard budget wall, not a soft one. Log actual prompt token counts per request in production, not estimates — the cliff triggers on the real count xAI measures, and a system prompt plus growing chat history plus retrieved context can cross it without any single change looking like the cause. If you're designing the pipeline, cap context deliberately below 200K (trim history, chunk retrieval tighter) rather than letting it drift up to whatever the model's 500K window allows — the context window and the pricing tier are two different numbers, and only one of them is free to use. And when you're comparing Grok against GPT-6 Astra's Fast/Batch split or Gemini's time-based discount, remember they're not the same shape of pricing risk: those move because you change a setting, Grok's moves because your data did.
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Pricing verified against xAI's official developer pricing docs (docs.x.ai/developers/pricing), checked 2026-09-24. Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.7 both ship a 500K-token context window; the 200K-token tier threshold and the 1.1x US regional endpoint premium apply to both models identically per xAI's docs. Workload figures (request volumes, token counts) are illustrative scenarios computed against real published per-token rates, not vendor-supplied numbers — confirm current pricing in your xAI console before budgeting.