As of August 21, 2026, Grok-3 Mini is 53% cheaper per million tokens than Grok Code Fast 1. Grok-3 Mini is $0.30 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Grok Code Fast 1 at $0.20 / $1.50. Source: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models
Source: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models)
Grok-3 Mini
xAI
Input
$0.30
Output
$0.50
Grok Code Fast 1
xAI
Input
$0.20
Output
$1.50
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Grok-3 MiniGrok Code Fast 1Verdict
Grok-3 Mini offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 21, 2026, Grok-3 Mini is 53% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens ($0.80 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok Code Fast 1 costs $0.20 / $1.50 per million tokens ($1.70 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-3 Mini xAI API pricing is $0.30 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Grok Code Fast 1 xAI API pricing is $0.20 input and $1.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok Code Fast 1 has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 70.8%. Grok-3 Mini does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok-3 Mini supports a 128K token context window, while Grok Code Fast 1 supports 256K tokens. Grok Code Fast 1 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-3 Mini leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks versus Grok Code Fast 1'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-3 Mini and Grok Code Fast 1 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Grok-3 Mini 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-3 Mini through xAI and Grok Code Fast 1 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-3 Mini supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while Grok Code Fast 1 supports up to 10K 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-3 Mini runs at approximately 100 tokens/second while Grok Code Fast 1 runs at 76.41 tokens/second. Grok-3 Mini 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-3 Mini or Grok Code Fast 1 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-3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. Grok Code Fast 1 costs $0.20/M input and $1.50/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
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