If you read our earlier breakdown of this topic, some of the numbers in it are now stale. xAI shipped a new Imagine video model in late July 2026, and it doesn’t cost the same as the one everyone benchmarked against Sora 2 and Veo. I pulled the current rates straight from xAI’s developer docs this week to rebuild this guide from scratch.

Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Just Made Everything More Expensive

Here’s the thing nobody’s search results will tell you clearly yet: xAI didn’t replace the old Grok Imagine video model with 1.5. It kept both live on the API, and they bill at different rates. I checked docs.x.ai/developers/pricing directly (last updated July 3, 2026, still current as of this week) to confirm both model IDs are active side by side.

The original grok-imagine-video model — the one that made headlines as “the cheapest video API on the market” — is still there at $0.05/sec for 480p and $0.07/sec for 720p. But grok-imagine-video-1.5, which xAI expanded with three generation modes and native 1080p output in late July 2026, costs meaningfully more:

Model	480p / sec	720p / sec	1080p / sec	Media input
grok-imagine-video (legacy)	$0.05	$0.07	Not available	$0.01/sec or $0.002/img
grok-imagine-video-1.5 (current)	$0.08	$0.14	$0.25	$0.01/img

Do the math on that and the jump is stark: 480p is 60% pricier on 1.5, and 720p is exactly double. There’s no like-for-like comparison at 1080p because the legacy model never offered it — 1.5 is the first Imagine model to render native Full HD, and only for text-to-video and image-to-video. Reference-to-video (the mode that locks a character or product’s appearance across a clip using up to seven reference images) tops out at 720p.

1.5 also adds a genuinely new capability: reference-to-video can drop in up to three built-in xAI preset voices, tagged in your prompt as <AUDIO_0> through <AUDIO_2>. Worth flagging, though — that’s preset-voice conditioning, not voice cloning. You can’t upload your own audio, and as of now xAI limits it to trusted partners in the US.

What a Real Clip Actually Costs (Worked Examples)

Forget the abstract per-second rate for a second. Here’s what you’d actually pay for the clip lengths most people generate, before any media-input charges, retries, or storage costs:

Clip length	Legacy 480p	Legacy 720p	1.5 @ 480p	1.5 @ 720p	1.5 @ 1080p
5 sec	$0.25	$0.35	$0.40	$0.70	$1.25
10 sec	$0.50	$0.70	$0.80	$1.40	$2.50
15 sec (max)	$0.75	$1.05	$1.20	$2.10	$3.75

A practical note from testing both models this month: the legacy model hasn’t been deprecated, and xAI gives no indication it’s going away soon. If your use case is background B-roll, social filler clips, or high-volume testing where 480p is genuinely fine, pinning your requests to grok-imagine-video instead of letting a wrapper tool auto-select “latest” will quietly save you 40–100% depending on resolution. I’d treat that as the single most useful cost lever in this whole guide.

Subscription vs. API: Which One Actually Fits You

The consumer side of Grok Imagine fragmented a lot in 2026. There isn’t just “SuperGrok” anymore — xAI added a Lite tier in March, and the old two-tier system (SuperGrok / SuperGrok Heavy) is now a five-way split once you count X’s bundled plans.

Plan	Price	Imagine video access	Best for
Free	$0	Very limited, ~10 prompts/2 hrs	Sampling only
X Premium	~$8/mo	Bundled, capped	Casual X users
SuperGrok Lite	$10/mo	Entry-level standalone access	Light, occasional use
SuperGrok	$30/mo	Fair-use cap, community estimates ~100 clips/mo	Regular creators
X Premium+	~$40/mo	Higher cap than SuperGrok Lite, plus X perks	Heavy X posters
SuperGrok Heavy	$300/mo	Highest limits (no longer marketed as “unlimited”)	Professional/agency volume

One thing worth flagging honestly: xAI quietly softened its SuperGrok Heavy marketing language sometime in mid-2026, from “near-unlimited usage” to “highest usage limits.” That’s not a cosmetic change. Users on forums and X have reported daily video clip caps on Heavy dropping from roughly 100 to around 30, with some describing resolution getting silently downgraded from 720p to 480p once you’re near the ceiling. xAI hasn’t published exact numbers for any consumer tier, so treat all of this as community-sourced, not official — but it’s consistent enough across independent reports that I wouldn’t assume “$300 = unlimited” going in.

Is Grok Imagine Still the Cheapest? A Fresh Look vs Sora 2, Veo 3.1, and Kling

This is where the story genuinely changed since our last review. Grok Imagine’s old “budget king” reputation was built entirely on the legacy model’s $0.05–$0.07/sec rate. Now that 1.5 is the default most tools reach for, the picture is more mixed — Grok still beats Google’s flagship Veo 3.1 Standard tier, but it no longer automatically beats every competitor at every resolution.

The honest takeaway: at 480p, Grok’s legacy model and Google’s Veo 3.1 Lite are now priced identically at $0.05/sec — Grok’s old “cheapest on the market” claim doesn’t hold at that tier anymore. Where Grok Imagine 1.5 still pulls ahead is against Veo’s flagship Standard tier ($0.40/sec) and anything touching Sora 2 Pro, and it’s the only model here bundling native audio into every tier without an extra generation step. If you compared prices for this exact keyword back in April, this is genuinely the part that’s changed the most.

Why “Credits” Keep Showing Up in Search Results

If you landed here searching “Grok Imagine credits,” here’s the honest explanation: xAI itself doesn’t sell credits for video on grok.com, X, or the official API. Both are billed in real currency — subscriptions in flat monthly dollars, the API in fractions of a cent per second.

The “credit” language you’re seeing in search results comes from third-party wrappers that resell Grok’s models with their own packaging on top. A few examples I checked this month: one aggregator prices a 5-second clip at 240 credits (tied to their own subscription tiers), while another sells transparent packs — 50 credits for 5 seconds, 100 for 10 seconds, 150 for 15 seconds, with a $29 pack covering roughly 14 five-second clips. None of those numbers map cleanly back to xAI’s $0.08–$0.25/sec API rate, because the reseller is adding its own margin and packaging logic on top. If you want the real, unmarked-up price, go straight to console.x.ai and use the API directly.

How I Verified These Numbers

Pricing pages for AI video tools go stale fast — the last version of this article was already six weeks behind by the time xAI shipped 1.5. For this rewrite, I didn’t lean on aggregator round-ups. I pulled the rate table directly from xAI’s own docs.x.ai/developers/pricing page, cross-checked the model IDs and resolution tiers against the official release notes for the 1.5 rollout, and compared that against independent, dated pricing trackers to confirm nothing had shifted again in the days before publishing. Every dollar figure in the tables above reflects what xAI’s console currently bills — not a third-party estimate. Where community-reported details (like SuperGrok Heavy’s shifting caps) couldn’t be confirmed against an official source, I’ve flagged them explicitly as unofficial rather than presenting them as fact.

How to Test Grok Imagine Without Overspending

If you’re deciding where to start, this is the order I’d actually recommend based on the current rate card:

• Get an API key at console.x.ai and load a small balance — $5 is plenty to run real tests.
• Prototype on the legacy model at 480p first. Ten test generations at 5 seconds each on grok-imagine-video costs roughly $2.50, and it’s the cheapest way to sanity-check a prompt before spending 1.5-tier money on it.
• Only render the final version on 1.5 once you know the prompt works, and only bump to 720p or 1080p if the extra clarity actually matters for where the clip is going.
• If you’re generating daily, price out SuperGrok ($30/mo) against your actual API spend before committing — for most creators making under roughly 40 clips a month, the API stays cheaper.
• Don’t assume Heavy means unlimited. If your workflow needs true high-volume, uncapped output, the API’s pay-per-second model is more predictable than betting on a subscription’s fair-use ceiling.

This same “test cheap, render expensive” logic is worth applying across the whole AI video stack, not just Grok. We walked through similar model-tier tradeoffs when we compared Kling AI’s pricing structure and again when reviewing Runway ML’s credit system, if you’re weighing more than one platform.

The Bottom Line: Is Grok Imagine Still Worth It?

If you’re a developer building a product: yes, with a caveat. Pin your model ID deliberately — don’t let a wrapper silently route you to 1.5 when the legacy model would do the job for less. At $0.05–$0.07/sec, the legacy model is still genuinely competitive; 1.5 is a premium tier for when you need 1080p or reference-guided consistency.

If you’re a creator making a moderate volume of clips: run the numbers before subscribing. Twenty 10-second clips a month on the legacy API model costs about $10 — cheaper than SuperGrok’s $30 flat fee. Cross that volume threshold and the subscription starts making more sense, assuming you don’t hit the fair-use ceiling.

The “credits” myth, once more for the record: there aren’t any on the official platform. It’s seconds and dollars, not a gift-card balance you have to guess the value of. Whatever platform you land on, that transparency alone is worth something.

FAQ

How many credits does a Grok Imagine video cost?

None, officially. xAI bills the API in USD per second ($0.05–$0.25 depending on model and resolution) and SuperGrok subscriptions in flat monthly dollars. Any “credit” number you see comes from a third-party reseller, not xAI.

Is Grok Imagine Video 1.5 more expensive than the original model?

Yes. At 480p it costs 60% more ($0.08 vs $0.05 per second), and at 720p it’s exactly double ($0.14 vs $0.07 per second). Both models remain live on the API as of August 2026.

Does SuperGrok include unlimited video generation?

No. SuperGrok ($30/mo) runs on an unpublished fair-use cap that community estimates put around 100 generations a month. SuperGrok Heavy ($300/mo) was originally marketed as “near-unlimited” but xAI’s own pricing language has since shifted to “highest usage limits,” and users have reported tighter daily caps than before.

Is audio included in the price?

Yes, on both models. Native audio generation is bundled into the per-second rate — you don’t pay a separate fee for sound the way you would with some competing video APIs.

What’s the cheapest way to test Grok Imagine before committing to a plan?

Open an API key at console.x.ai, load $5, and generate on the legacy grok-imagine-video model at 480p. Ten 5-second test clips costs roughly $2.50 — less than a tenth of a SuperGrok subscription.

Is Sora 2 still a fair comparison point?

Only briefly. OpenAI has scheduled the Sora 2 API to shut down on September 24, 2026, with no announced direct replacement. If you’re building a long-term pipeline around any video API right now, that’s worth factoring in before you commit.

For more on how Grok’s video output actually compares in practice, see our Sora 2 vs Grok breakdown and our wider look at Grok 4 vs GPT-5. If you’re building out a broader video toolkit, we’ve also covered free InVideo AI alternatives, whether Remotion is safe to use for code-based video, watermark-free video editors, our Opus Clip review for repurposing long-form footage, and a roundup of AI tools for designers and creatives that pair well with an Imagine-based pipeline.