X Premium+ tier gets an absurd price hike, thanks to Grok-3 AI

Less than a day after announcing the Grok-3 AI model, Elon Musk-led X has hiked the price of a subscription tier that opens the doors for xAI’s next-gen AI chatbot. Access to the new Grok-3 model is available for only X Premium+ subscribers, and folks who pay for the new SuperGrok standalone subscription.

As of the first week of February, the Premium+ tier started at $22 per month, or $299 for the annual plan. Following the Grok-3 launch, the monthly plan is now listed at $40, while the yearly plan will now cost $396 per account.

The US appears to be the only market where the subscription prices have gone up, as per the official help page. This would be the second surge in the pricing of Premium+ subscription in quick succession. In December, the same subscription package went up from $16 to $22 per month.

However, the rates have also been raised quietly in more markets, without updating the support documents. For example, the Premium+ monthly tier has climbed from GBP 17 to 47 in the UK. For X users in India, it has gone from INR 1,750 to INR 5,130, which is nearly three-fold surge.

The ask for the X’s Basic and Premium subscription bundles remains unchanged. The mark-up for the Premium+ tier, however, is not entirely unexpected, considering some of the AI features that Grok-3 has to offer.

The most notable among them are DeepSearch and BigThink. The former pulls essentially the same trick as Deep Research does for Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Perplexity. Yes, all three companies are using the same name for their respective offerings.

DeepSearch (or Research) is an agentic feature, which means it deputes the AI chatbot to act more like an assistant for searching, sorting, and compiling all the information you need in the form of a comprehensive report, complete with citations.

A query like this takes considerably higher amount of time than an average chatbot interaction, but more importantly, it’s a lot more compute intensive.

AI will now take your money. Thanks!

It’s no surprise that when OpenAI originally launched Deep Research, it locked it behind a $200/month ChatGPT Pro subscription plan. OpenAI will eventually roll out Deep Research within the $20 ChatGPT Plus bundle, as well.

Google, on the other hand, has kept it exclusive to Gemini Advanced, which is available with a $20 monthly subscription for the Google One AI Premium bundle. Perplexity offers a limited number of free Deep Research queries per day, but if you intend to use it frequently, you will need to part ways with a minimum $20 per month for a premium subscription.

As far as Grok-3 goes, it will be the most expensive mainstream AI product on the market to offer a DeepSearch capability. X says the Premium+ subscription will also offer enhanced image generation bandwidth.

The proposition of forking double the amount what rivals are asking is certainly a bit too much. But if it comes as any consolation, Grok-3 has outpaced the likes of OpenAI, Google, Claude, and DeepSeek’s AI models, as per benchmarks shared by the company.

Moreover, a Premium+ subscription also offers social media benefits such as a blue verified checkmark, creator earnings, revenue sharing with ad placement, longer posts, higher video upload limit, and an ad-free experience.