Grok 2 API Rate Limits, Pricing & Performance (July 2026)

Rate limits by tier

Grok 2 is a retired legacy model with no current first-party xAI SKU — rate limits are not published for the retired endpoint. The limits below describe the current successor Grok 4.5, which is what xAI actively supports. Historical anecdotal references for Grok 2-era fast models cited ~600 RPM / 10 RPS; treat these as non-authoritative context only.

Swipe the table sideways to see every limit column.

• 1.Grok 2 pricing is not published for any current endpoint — treat the model as end-of-life.
• 2.Grok 4.5 pricing and limits are shown below; API billing is independent of X Premium/SuperGrok subscriptions.
• 3.No free API tier — the old $150/month credit program ended May 2025.
• 4.Deprecated grok-4 slugs redirect to grok-4.3 billing; Grok 2 has no explicit redirect documented.

Limits verified against the xAI docs, July 10, 2026.

Token pricing

What you pay per million tokens (USD). Input and output are billed separately.

• Pricing shown is for Grok 4.5 (current successor) — Grok 2 pricing is not published (retired).
• Cached input $0.50/MTok (75% off the $2.00 standard rate).
• Batch discount not available for Grok 4.5 at launch.
• Requests using more than 200K tokens within the 500K context window bill at a higher unpublished rate.
• Server-side tools billed separately: Web/X Search and Code Execution $5/1,000 calls; File Attachments $10/1,000 calls; Collections Search $2.50/1,000 calls.
• A $0.05 fee applies per request flagged for a usage-policy violation.
• Reasoning (thinking) tokens are billed as output tokens and can spike unexpectedly.

Run your own numbers

Drag your real monthly token volumes and watch the bill update live — priced against rival models at the same usage.

grok-2 / grok-2-vision (historical; not promoted — verify if still callable on docs.x.ai; current flagship: grok-4.5) vs the alternatives

Grok 4.5 (successor to Grok 2) vs GPT-5.5, Mistral Large 3, and Qwen3-Max — all live models at comparable capability tiers.

Swipe the table sideways to see every model.

Hitting a 429? The playbook

1import OpenAI from 'openai';
2
3const client = new OpenAI({
4  apiKey: process.env.XAI_API_KEY,
5  baseURL: 'https://api.x.ai/v1',
6});
7
8async function chatWithRetry(
9  messages: OpenAI.Chat.ChatCompletionMessageParam[],
10  maxRetries = 6
11): Promise<string> {
12  for (let attempt = 0; attempt < maxRetries; attempt++) {
13    try {
14      const response = await client.chat.completions.create({
15        // Migrate from 'grok-2' to current Grok 4.5 string — verify on docs.x.ai
16        model: 'grok-4.5',
17        messages,
18      });
19      return response.choices[0].message.content ?? '';
20    } catch (err) {
21      if (err instanceof OpenAI.RateLimitError && attempt < maxRetries - 1) {
22        const jitter = 1 + Math.random() * 0.2;
23        const wait = Math.pow(2, attempt) * 1000 * jitter;
24        console.warn(`Rate limit — waiting ${Math.round(wait)}ms (attempt ${attempt + 1})`);
25        await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, wait));
26      } else {
27        throw err;
28      }
29    }
30  }
31  throw new Error('Max retries exceeded');
32}

How to raise your limits

The ladder from the starter tier to enterprise — what each rung takes, and what it unlocks.

Cut your token spend

Related models

More grok-2 / grok-2-vision (historical; not promoted — verify if still callable on docs.x.ai; current flagship: grok-4.5) resources