Grok vs your own bot: price, harness and flexibility

Grok is a ready-made assistant from xAI: you pay a monthly fee and start chatting. 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. Prices below are as of September 2026.

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

Price

Grok’s plans on xAI’s price page, as of September 2026: Free with limits, SuperGrok at $30 a month, SuperGrok Plus at $100 a month, and Business at $30 a month. Lite and Heavy tiers also exist.

Your own bot pays the model per use. xAI’s API prices, as of September 2026: Grok 4.3 costs $1.25 per million tokens read and $2.50 per million written; Grok 4.7 costs $2 and $6. xAI’s docs list no free API credits.

A worked example. The first three lines are our assumptions:

• 1,000 conversations a month.
• Six customer messages in each.
• Each reply reads about 1,500 tokens and writes about 250.
• So 9 million tokens read and 1.5 million written a month.
• On Grok 4.3: 9 × $1.25 + 1.5 × $2.50 = about $15 a month.
• On Grok 4.7: 9 × $2 + 1.5 × $6 = about $27 a month.

Repeated text can be billed at a lower “cached” rate, so bills often come in under this. Hosting is a flat plan on top; see aidrop.it for current plans.

Harness

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.

Flexibility

Grok lives where xAI puts it: its apps, its website and X. xAI’s Grok Bot works inside your tools as a teammate for you, not as a bot your customers message. xAI also lets a subscription power Hermes Agent, an open-source personal agent that can chat over Telegram or WhatsApp.

Grok inside Telegram was announced by Telegram’s founder in May 2025; Elon Musk replied that no deal had been signed, and Telegram’s update posts through August 2026 announce no launch.

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, and with live X search.
• Your team needs admin controls. On Business, xAI lists “no training” on your data and custom data retention.

When your own bot is the right choice

• Customers talk to it in Telegram, WhatsApp or on your site.
• 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 are Project secrets: XAI_API_KEY, TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN,
TELEGRAM_WEBHOOK_SECRET. Build, check it runs, fix from logs.
Report the address, the model, and how to switch provider.

What your agent does

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, checks it runs, and fixes errors if not.
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 September 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 tier 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. On the price page, “no training” is listed only for the Business and Enterprise plans.

What does it cost to run my own AI bot?

The model is paid per use: about 1,000 support chats a month came to roughly $15 to $27 on Grok in the example above. Hosting is the other part. On aidrop.it it is a flat plan; a bot that remembers conversations needs a plan with a database. Current plans are on aidrop.it.

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