Free Grok API access: what is actually free.

Quick answer: four routes, four catches.

There is no self-hosting route for current models: xAI has open-sourced only the early Grok-1 weights, and nothing from the Grok 4 generation. So unlike the Chinese open-weight families, the free-Grok question is entirely a hosted-access question, which makes the routes above the complete list.

• The consumer Grok chatbot on X and grok.com: genuinely free usage with daily limits. The catch: it is a chat product, not an API, and no key comes with it.
• xAI credit programs: the public-beta monthly credits (25 USD) ended with the 2024 beta, and the larger data-sharing credit program, community-reported near $150 per month, has changed terms and availability more than once; 2026 guides disagree on its current status. The catch: nothing here is dependable enough to plan around without checking console.x.ai yourself.
• Launch promotions: around the July 2026 Grok 4.5 release, xAI offered time-limited free usage through specific tools (its Grok Build environment and a partner coding editor, per launch coverage). The catch: promos are scoped, dated, and gone when they are gone.
• APIsRouter's free starting credit: issued without a card, spendable on grok-4.5 at the same catalog rate as paid traffic, next to every other family. The catch is the honest one: a starting credit, not an unlimited tier; pay-as-you-go after.

What xAI offers, and what only looks like an offer.

The developer API at console.x.ai is prepaid pay-as-you-go: create an account, load credits, generate a key. Around that paid core, three things get remembered as a free tier. The 2024 public beta really did grant monthly credits (25 USD) to every account, and it ended when the beta closed. The data-sharing program, monthly credits for teams that opt into sharing API request data, subject to prior spend and eligible countries, has been real at points since 2025, but its terms have shifted and 2026 write-ups disagree about whether it currently runs; the console, not a blog post, is the source of truth. And new accounts have sometimes received small promotional trial credits, occasional and unguaranteed. The July 2026 Grok 4.5 launch added the newest wrinkle: time-limited free access to the new model through xAI's own Grok Build and a partner editor, per launch coverage. Real, useful for a quick evaluation, and explicitly temporary. None of that is a standing free API tier, and planning a project on any of it means planning on a program that can end mid-project.

What the free starting credit here actually is.

The route on this site is deliberately simple: a free starting credit, no card required, spendable on any catalog id, including grok-4.5, xAI's July 2026 coding-and-agents flagship, at its 500K-token context. There is no degraded free endpoint and no separate free-model list; the credit meters the same model at the same catalog rate as paid traffic. When it runs out, access continues as pay-as-you-go top-ups with no subscription, and an idle month costs nothing. To be precise about what this is not: it is not unlimited free Grok. Nobody serves a frontier model without metering it somewhere, and pages that promise otherwise are describing a rate limit in optimistic language. What the credit buys is a real evaluation: the current model, real rate behavior, and exact per-request token counts in the usage log, before any money moves. One comparison the usage log settles quickly: grok-4.5 against the low-priced Chinese families on the same prompts. The same key runs deepseek-v4-flash, glm-5, and kimi-k2.6, which turns "which model should carry this workload" from a forum debate into an afternoon of identical requests.

curl https://api.apisrouter.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APISROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "grok-4.5",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Write a regex that validates semver strings, with tests."}]
  }'

The consumer free tier, and why it keeps fooling people.

Grok on X and grok.com has a real free tier: daily-limited chatbot usage, no payment, no key. It is the right answer for trying the model conversationally, and the wrong answer for every search that ends in "API", because no automation can sit on top of it and scraping a chat UI violates the terms it runs under. The confusion is understandable: the same brand covers a free consumer product and a prepaid developer platform, and coverage of one gets read as coverage of the other. The test is one question: does the route hand you an sk-style key and answer at an HTTPS endpoint? The chatbot does not. The routes that do, xAI's prepaid console and gateway credits like the one here, are the API answers, and each meters usage because serving frontier models costs someone money per token.

Pay-as-you-go · transparent per-model pricing

Selected models are priced below official list prices. Exact input, output, cache, and per-request prices are shown for each model.

When free stops being the right answer.

Free Grok routes fail in characteristic ways: a launch promo expires on schedule, a conditional credit program changes terms, a consumer tier caps the day's usage mid-session. The signal to move is the first time a limit costs more time than the metered price would have cost money. Grok 4.5's pricing posture makes the move less dramatic than the flagship era's: xAI positioned it as an efficiency release, and launch coverage highlighted its per-task cost landing well under the Western flagships it competes with. At catalog rates here, typical chat turns cost a small fraction of a cent, and the pricing table above puts the exact per-million figures next to the other families. Because the starting credit and paid traffic share one endpoint and one key, outgrowing free involves no migration: the same base URL, the same grok-4.5 string, and a balance that tops up instead of a promo that expires.

Which free route fits which situation.

• Trying Grok conversationally: the consumer chatbot on X or grok.com. Free, daily-limited, no API.
• A quick look at Grok 4.5 specifically, during launch season: check whether xAI's time-limited promos still run in Grok Build or the partner editor; they are dated by design.
• Teams already spending with xAI: check the console for whatever conditional credit program currently exists, and read its data-sharing terms before opting in.
• Evaluating grok-4.5 for real work, especially against other families: the starting credit here, because one key runs the whole comparison at catalog rates.
• Production traffic of any size: metered pay-as-you-go, on either xAI's console or a gateway. No free mechanism is built to carry production, and Grok has no self-host escape hatch for current models.

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