As of August 20, 2026, Nova Lite is 96% cheaper per million tokens than Grok 4.5. Grok 4.5 is $2.00 / $6.00 per million input/output tokens versus Nova Lite at $0.06 / $0.24. Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing
Sources: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models); AnotherWrapper LLM pricing (https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing)
Grok 4.5
xAI
Input
$2.00
Output
$6.00
Nova Lite
Amazon
Input
$0.06
Output
$0.24
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Grok 4.5Nova LiteVerdict
Nova Lite offers significantly lower pricing, while Grok 4.5 leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 20, 2026, Nova Lite is 96% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Nova Lite costs $0.06 per million input tokens and $0.24 per million output tokens ($0.30 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok 4.5 costs $2.00 / $6.00 per million tokens ($8.00 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok 4.5 xAI API pricing is $2.00 input and $6.00 output per million tokens via xAI. Nova Lite Amazon API pricing is $0.06 input and $0.24 output per million tokens via Amazon. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok 4.5 has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 86.6%. Nova Lite does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok 4.5 supports a 500K token context window, while Nova Lite supports 300K tokens. Grok 4.5 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 4.5 leads on 2 of 2 shared benchmarks versus Nova Lite'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 4.5 and Nova Lite are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Nova Lite 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 4.5 through xAI and Nova Lite through Amazon 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 Amazon API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. 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 4.5 supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens per request, while Nova Lite supports up to 2K 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 4.5 runs at approximately 80 tokens/second while Nova Lite runs at 100 tokens/second. Nova Lite 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 4.5 or Nova Lite 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 4.5 costs $2.00/M input and $6.00/M output. Nova Lite costs $0.06/M input and $0.24/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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