As of August 25, 2026, Grok 4 Fast is 96% cheaper per million tokens than Grok-4.1 Thinking. Grok 4 Fast is $0.20 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Grok-4.1 Thinking at $3.00 / $15.00. Source: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models
Source: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models)
Grok 4 Fast
xAI
Input
$0.20
Output
$0.50
Grok-4.1 Thinking
xAI
Input
$3.00
Output
$15.00
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
Arena Code Elo. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Grok 4 FastGrok-4.1 ThinkingVerdict
Grok 4 Fast offers significantly lower pricing, while Grok-4.1 Thinking leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 25, 2026, Grok 4 Fast is 96% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Grok 4 Fast costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens ($0.70 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok-4.1 Thinking costs $3.00 / $15.00 per million tokens ($18.00 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://docs.x.ai/docs/models. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok 4 Fast xAI API pricing is $0.20 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Grok-4.1 Thinking xAI API pricing is $3.00 input and $15.00 output per million tokens via xAI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok 4 Fast has a published LiveCodeBench score of 80%. Grok-4.1 Thinking does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok 4 Fast supports a 2M token context window, while Grok-4.1 Thinking supports 256K tokens. Grok 4 Fast offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Grok-4.1 Thinking leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks versus Grok 4 Fast's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Grok 4 Fast and Grok-4.1 Thinking are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Grok 4 Fast has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Grok 4 Fast through xAI and Grok-4.1 Thinking through xAI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published xAI API pricing and xAI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://docs.x.ai/docs/models. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Grok 4 Fast supports up to 30K output tokens per request, while Grok-4.1 Thinking supports up to 8K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Grok 4 Fast runs at approximately 90 tokens/second while Grok-4.1 Thinking runs at 80 tokens/second. Grok 4 Fast is faster in raw throughput. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Grok 4 Fast or Grok-4.1 Thinking from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Grok 4 Fast costs $0.20/M input and $0.50/M output. Grok-4.1 Thinking costs $3.00/M input and $15.00/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
The index
280 models across 33 providers. Search or jump to a lab — every model page stays linked here.
Next step
Auth, billing, and the API layer are already decided. Fork 8 finished AI apps, or have us build the first version with you.
