Grok Build
xAI's terminal-native autonomous coding agent
Developers already on an X subscription who want a low-cost, plan-first CLI agent for parallelizable work — not yet a strong choice where Claude Code or Codex CLI currently lead on accuracy and trust
Founded 2026 · USA
Good Fit If You're...
Large-scale multi-service migrations
Teams needing to touch dozens of files or services fan out 8 sub-agents in parallel git worktrees to cut wall-clock time.
Test and coverage backfills
Parallel sub-agents generate and validate test suites across a codebase concurrently.
Cost-sensitive agentic workflows
Developers already paying for an X subscription get a bundled coding agent without a separate subscription.
Multi-vendor agent orchestration
Engineers building pipelines that combine Grok Build with Claude Code or Codex CLI exploit its price advantage for high-volume, lower-stakes work.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Limited weekly Grok Build usage on Grok 4.6 with a free grok.com account (added Aug 25, 2026) |
| X Plus (bundled) | $8/mo | — |
| X Premium (bundled) | $30/mo | — |
| X Super (bundled) | $100/mo | — |
| X Ultra (bundled) | $200/mo | — |
Hidden costs to be aware of:
- Bundled usage scales by tier: Plus = base, Premium = 4x, Super = 15x, Ultra = 50x
- Annual billing is cheaper: Plus $80/yr ($7/mo), Premium $300/yr ($25/mo), Super $1,000/yr ($84/mo), Ultra $2,000/yr ($167/mo)
- As of Aug 25, 2026, Grok Build access expanded to every plan including Free — previously bundled-only with no free tier
- Pay-as-you-go API pricing also available; exact current rates conflict across sources (~$1-2/1M input, $2-6/1M output tokens) — verify directly before relying on a specific figure
- Open-sourced (Apache 2.0) July 2026, but xAI doesn't accept external pull requests or issues — 'source-available' rather than community-governed
- Free-tier model bumped from Grok 4.3 to Grok 4.6; xAI's flagship model has since moved on to Grok 4.7
Pricing last verified: 2026-10-13
Strengths & Limitations
Strengths
- +Plan Mode by default — drafts a structured plan for human approval/edit before touching any files
- +Up to 8 parallel sub-agents in isolated git worktrees for large multi-file migrations
- +Cheapest frontier-class pricing among the major terminal agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Grok Build)
- +Low switching cost — reuses existing conventions (AGENTS.md, MCP servers, hooks) from Claude Code and Codex
Limitations
- -Serious July 2026 privacy incident — a researcher found it silently uploading entire git repos, including secrets and commit history, to an xAI cloud bucket at ~27,800x the data a task needed; xAI says it's fixed and deleted the data, but no independent audit has confirmed that
- -Lower benchmark scores than rivals — 70.8% SWE-bench Verified vs. Claude Code's ~87.6% and Codex CLI's ~88.7%
- -Smaller context window — 256K tokens vs. Claude Code's up-to-1M-token option, a real constraint on large monorepos
- -Mixed early-beta reception — Hacker News users reported hallucinations, harness crashes, and being '6 months behind' competitors
What Real Users Say
“UX friction is worse than Claude Code — recommend Claude Code 5x Max for better value.”
“Pleasantly surprised by its performance on projects.”
How It Compares
Similar Tools
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Last updated: 2026-10-13