Grok Bot launched in beta on Aug 11, 2026. Fifteen days later the cheapest route in was $20 a month. Nothing about the product got cheaper to run in that window — the packaging changed, three times, and it changed the economics for everyone building next to it.
The timeline, in order
A pricing snapshot taken Aug 12 found Grok Bot was not sold standalone at all. It rode on three existing plans: SuperGrok Heavy at $300/mo, Cursor Ultra at $200/mo, and Cursor Premium Teams at $120/seat/mo. There was no free tier.
On Aug 21 xAI's official account announced that SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+, and all Cursor Teams plans got Grok Bot, and that everyone else got a limited free trial. On the reported SuperGrok ladder — Lite $10, SuperGrok $30, Plus $100, Heavy $300 — that moved the SuperGrok-side floor from $300 to $100. Recaps around the same date also said the trial requires a credit card to activate, and that Windows and Linux desktop clients went live; no official dated post confirming those specifics was found, so treat them as reported rather than settled.
On Aug 26 the official account announced that all SuperGrok and Cursor Pro subscribers get Grok Bot, and reset weekly usage limits for everyone. That put the effective entry price at $30/mo (SuperGrok) or $20/mo (Cursor Pro), with Bot usage metered separately from existing plan usage.
$300 to $100 to $20, in fifteen days.
What is still not priced
A living pricing note updated Aug 27 mapped eight routes to access and found the parts that matter to a heavy user are unpublished: the weekly allowance is not documented, on-demand overflow billing is shared rather than per-Bot, and there is no published enterprise price. So $20 buys an entry ticket with an undisclosed ceiling. If you are sizing a build against it, size against the ceiling you cannot see, not the headline.
The clone ecosystem lost its umbrella
Two open alternatives shipped inside that window. rakazo (Aug 13, Apache-2.0) runs Bots in Docker on your own machine, behind your firewall, with sessions and credentials staying on your infrastructure; the GitHub API showed 742 stars, 95 forks and 13 open issues on Aug 17, and the maintainer is building a hosted managed version as the paid product. OpenBot (Aug 19, CopilotKit) is harness-agnostic and self-hostable, with a launch post reported at 438.5K views in a day, though its memory plane is a licensed CopilotKit service unless you run it yourself.
Both were conceived against a $300 floor. A managed clone priced at $47/mo was a discount on Aug 12 and a premium on Aug 26 — roughly 1.5x to 2x the incumbent, for a product without the native mobile app or the Cursor distribution channel. Price is no longer a wedge. What is left is what money cannot buy from xAI today: per-Bot isolation (a review dated Aug 27 notes the one shared computer is explicitly not a security boundary between your own Bots), self-hosting behind a firewall, and bring-your-own harness.
Who each remaining tier is for
Cursor Pro at $20 is for people already living in the editor; it is the cheapest door and probably the default. SuperGrok at $30 is for people who want Grok Bot without Cursor. All Cursor Teams plans have carried access since Aug 21 — the launch-era Premium Teams figure was $120/seat, and we have not seen a dated post restating it since. Plus, Ultra and Heavy no longer buy access to anything; they buy more of the rest of the plan. Everyone else gets the trial, plus one side door: Lenny's Product Pass annual subscribers got a free month bundled with Cursor Pro+, announced Aug 26.