One AI Subscription Instead of Four? What xAI's New Plan Means for a Small Firm's Bill
The X Subscription runs Free, $8, $30, $100 and $200 a month, with one weekly usage pool shared across Grok and Cursor. Team seats cost the same per seat and add SSO and admin controls.
Primary source: xAI — Introducing The X Subscription (announced October 2026; read October 12, 2026).
xAI has folded Grok (chat, voice, image and video), Grok Bot (AI teammates that do tasks), Cursor (coding agents) and X Premium into one plan called The X Subscription. It is open to new customers now and rolling out globally over the next few days. Existing SuperGrok, Cursor and X Premium subscribers can keep what they have, or switch and get a prorated refund on the old plan.
The tiers
- Free, $0: daily Grok access, a starter allowance for Cursor's coding agents, standard X. Usage: limited.
- Plus, $8/month: more Grok and Cursor usage, plus an X checkmark, creator tools and fewer ads. Usage: the base unit.
- Premium, $30/month: the benefits of SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+, which xAI says cost $90/month combined before. Usage: 4x Plus.
- Super, $100/month: same features, 15x Plus usage.
- Ultra, $200/month: same features, 50x Plus usage.
Team seats cost the same as individual plans ($30, $100 or $200 a seat) with the same usage per seat, plus SSO, role-based access, consolidated billing, usage analytics and SOC 2 compliance. xAI says that is cheaper per seat than the older Cursor Teams plans, with 3x more coding usage.
How the usage pool works
Each paid tier gets one pool of Grok-model usage, shared across the Grok apps, the Grok tab on X, Grok Bot and Cursor. It refreshes weekly, so one heavy day does not eat the month. When it runs out you either top up or wait. xAI says every plan includes at least twice the coding usage of the comparable old Cursor plan.
The catch: non-xAI models in Cursor are available only on Premium and above, and they are billed separately at API list prices through top-ups. You can set spending caps. If your team leans on other vendors' models inside Cursor, the bundle price is not your full bill.
What it means for a small firm
Most small professional firms do not need four products. The useful question is simpler: what are you already paying for, and does this replace any of it?
- If nobody codes, the Cursor half is dead weight. Compare Premium at $30 a seat against a $20–25 chat seat from another vendor on the work your people actually do: drafting, summarising, research.
- If one or two people build tools or automations, a single $30 Premium seat for them may be cheaper than separate chat and coding plans. Check how much of their coding uses other vendors' models, since that goes on top.
- "Usage" is not a fixed number. The plans are sold as multiples of Plus (4x, 15x, 50x), and xAI says usage costs vary by product. Until you have watched a few weeks of real use, you cannot say what a seat buys.
- Don't switch on reflex. Old plans stay as they are for now, but xAI says it will eventually move remaining customers to the new plans, with advance notice and no timeline yet.
Before adding any seat, list every AI subscription and API bill the firm pays today. Our AI cost calculator puts seats and API spend side by side so you can see the monthly and yearly total before you buy.
Benchmarks
This is a pricing and packaging change, not a model release. The announcement publishes no benchmark scores, so there are none to report here.
Bottom line
The $30 Premium tier is a real price cut if you were paying for Grok, Cursor and X separately. If you weren't, it is one more option to weigh against what you already have. Decide by seat and by task, and treat the usage pool as something to measure, not assume.
