Grok vs your own bot: what a chatbot really costs

Grok is xAI’s ready-made AI assistant: you pay a monthly fee and start chatting in its app, on its website or on X. Grok Bot is a separate xAI product, an AI teammate that works on its own cloud computer to finish tasks for you; it comes with the SuperGrok plans. Your own bot is a program your coding agent writes for you, which can use Grok’s models or any other AI behind it. Pick Grok when the assistant is for you and your team. Pick your own bot when your customers should talk to it, in your channel, with your rules.

In short: Grok costs a flat $30 a month for SuperGrok. A customer bot of your own costs its AI usage, about $21 to $37 a month for 1,000 conversations in the example below, plus hosting. Prices are xAI’s, as of October 2026.

aidrop.it sells hosting for the “your own bot” option.

What each option costs

Grok, the subscription

Grok’s plans on xAI’s price page: a Free plan with usage limits, SuperGrok at $30 a month, SuperGrok Plus at $100 a month, and Grok Business at $30 per user a month.

Your own bot: a worked example

Your own bot pays the AI model for each reply. xAI’s API prices per million tokens: Grok 4.3 costs $1.25 for text it reads and $2.50 for text it writes; Grok 4.7 costs $2 and $6. xAI’s pricing docs list no free API credits.

Each reply reads more than the customer’s last message. The bot rereads its instructions and the whole conversation so far, because it keeps the last 20 messages of every chat as memory. Our assumptions:

• 1,000 conversations a month, six customer messages in each.
• Instructions of about 1,500 tokens, customer messages of about 50, replies of about 250.
• So the sixth reply in a conversation reads about 3,000 tokens, and one conversation reads about 14,000 in total and writes 1,500.
• That is 14 million tokens read and 1.5 million written a month.
• On Grok 4.3: 14 × $1.25 + 1.5 × $2.50 = about $21 a month.
• On Grok 4.7: 14 × $2 + 1.5 × $6 = about $37 a month.

Longer conversations cost more, because every reply rereads all of them. Text the model has just seen, such as the instructions, can be billed at a lower “cached” rate ($0.20 per million on Grok 4.3), so bills often come in under this.

Hosting comes on top. A bot that remembers conversations needs a database, which on aidrop.it starts with Pro at $20 a month; a bot with no memory runs on Starter at $5. All plans are on the pricing page.

Words you will meet

• Harness — everything around the AI model: its instructions, tools, memory, where people reach it, its limits, and the record of what it said. The model is the engine; the harness is the rest of the car.
• API — a paid connection a program uses to talk to an AI model. You pay for what you use, not a monthly fee.
• Token — a small piece of a word. AI companies charge per million tokens. A thousand tokens is roughly 750 English words.
• Database — where a bot keeps past conversations.

Side by side

Who controls the bot’s rules

With Grok, xAI builds the harness and you maintain nothing. You use it as shipped, and you cannot put it in front of customers with your own rules, tools and name.

With your own bot, every part is yours: the instructions, the tools, the conversations in your database, and limits like “never promise a refund”. Someone has to build it, and that is your coding agent.

Where each one can live

Grok lives where xAI puts it: its apps, its website and X. Grok Bot, described in xAI’s Grok Bot docs, works for you as a teammate, not as a bot your customers message. Since May 2026 xAI also lets a Grok subscription power Hermes Agent, an open-source personal agent that can chat over Telegram or WhatsApp. If a personal agent is what you are after, you can also run OpenClaw in the cloud.

Your own bot goes where your customers are, and it can switch models: start on Grok, move elsewhere if price or quality changes.

When Grok is the right choice

• The assistant is for you: writing, research, questions.
• You want it today, with nothing to maintain.
• Your team needs a shared plan. Grok Business promises no training on your company’s data.

When your own bot is the right choice

• Customers talk to it in Telegram, WhatsApp or on your site, or in a community you host a Discord bot 24/7 for.
• It must follow your rules and do things: find an order, save a lead.
• You want to keep the conversations and choose the model.

Say this to your agent

Build a customer-support bot as an aidrop.it Service in my Project (create a Project "Support bot" if I have none). Channel: Telegram, by webhook. Stack: your choice.

Read aidrop.it's runtime rules before writing code and follow them. Outbound calls go through the proxy in HTTPS_PROXY; make sure the HTTP client you use honours it.

Put the model behind ONE small interface (messages in, reply and optional tool calls out). First implementation: the xAI API, OpenAI-compatible, base URL https://api.x.ai/v1, key in XAI_API_KEY, model from LLM_MODEL (default grok-4.3). Another provider must mean one new file plus env vars.

Harness:
- System prompt in a repo file: answer only about my business, be brief, never promise refunds, offer a human.
- One tool: save_lead(name, contact, question) into the DB.
- Memory: last 20 messages per chat in PostgreSQL. Ask me before creating a database. Nothing on local disk.
- Limits: short replies, 30 messages per user per hour. Log conversations, never keys.

Secrets: ask me for XAI_API_KEY and TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN, and make up TELEGRAM_WEBHOOK_SECRET yourself. Store each one with project_secret_set under those names, and list them in required_secret_names when you build. Never print a value back to me, and never write one into code, the repository, a commit or a log. Build, check it runs, fix from logs. Report the address, the model, and how to switch provider.

What your agent does to build the support bot

1. Writes the bot and its instructions, and saves the code.
2. Asks you before adding a database for memory.
3. Builds it on aidrop.it and checks it answers on Telegram; a failed build usually means a missing key, and the agent asks you for it.
4. Gives you the link and tells you how to switch the AI model.

Full walkthroughs: Telegram bot with Claude Code and AI chatbot on your website.

FAQ

Is Grok free?

Yes, with limits. As of October 2026, xAI lists a Free plan and paid plans, such as SuperGrok at $30 a month, for higher limits and more features. The API that programs use is billed separately, per token, with no free credits listed in xAI’s pricing docs.

Does xAI train on what my customers type?

For the API, xAI’s security FAQ says it never trains on your inputs or outputs without your explicit permission. It keeps them 30 days for abuse checks, and offers a zero-retention option. In the Grok apps you choose in settings whether your chats are used for training, and Grok Business promises no training on your data.

What does it cost to run my own AI bot?

Two parts. The model is paid per use: about 1,000 support chats a month came to roughly $21 to $37 on Grok in the example above. Hosting is a flat plan: on aidrop.it, Pro at $20 a month for a bot that remembers conversations in a database, or Starter at $5 for one that does not.

Related

• Build a Telegram bot with Claude Code
• Add an AI chatbot to your website
• Build a WhatsApp bot
• Run Hermes Agent in the cloud
• All playbooks