Grok 3 mini pricing
An unusually cheap reasoning model, with output priced below most competitors' input rates — which matters because reasoning models are output-heavy by nature.
List prices checked
By xAI · Balanced tier
Token pricing
Per million tokens, from the official price list.
| Token type | Price per 1M | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.300 | Everything you send, including the system prompt |
| Output | $0.500 | Everything the model generates, reasoning tokens included |
| Blended (3:1) | $0.350 | One number for ranking, at three input tokens per output token |
Source: xAI pricing (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.
Capabilities
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Context window | 131K tokens |
| Inputs accepted | text |
| Cost to fill the context once | $0.04 |
What it costs per month
Token prices applied to three workload shapes. Input-heavy and output-heavy workloads rank models very differently.
In-app chat assistant
A support or help assistant handling a few thousand conversations a month, with short prompts and short answers.
$8.50/mo
- 20M input tokens$6.00
- 5M output tokens$2.50
RAG over documents
Retrieval-augmented answering where each request stuffs several retrieved passages into the prompt, so input dominates.
$98/mo
- 300M input tokens$90
- 15M output tokens$7.50
Coding agent
An agentic loop that reads files and writes patches, generating heavy output and re-sending large context on every turn.
$170/mo
- 400M input tokens$120
- 100M output tokens$50
Grok 3 mini vs other balanced models
Same capability tier, ranked by blended token price.
| Model | Input | Output | Context | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | $0.300 | $2.50 | 1M | Head to head |
| Codestral | $0.300 | $0.900 | 262K | Head to head |
| GPT-5 mini | $0.250 | $2.00 | 400K | Head to head |
| DeepSeek-V4-Flash | $0.140 | $0.280 | 1M | Head to head |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | 200K | Head to head |
| OpenAI o4-mini | $1.10 | $4.40 | 200K | Head to head |
Questions about pricing
- How much does the Grok 3 mini API cost in 2026?
- $0.300 per million input tokens and $0.500 per million output tokens, from xAI's published pricing. The table above converts that into a monthly figure for three common workloads.
- What is the Grok 3 mini context window?
- 131K tokens. Filling the window costs whatever that many input tokens cost — at $0.300 per million, a single full-context request runs about $0.04.
- Is Grok 3 mini cheaper than the alternatives?
- On a blended 3:1 input-to-output basis it works out at $0.350 per million tokens. The comparison table below ranks it against the other balanced models in the dataset, and the head-to-head pages model both against identical workloads.