SpaceXAI weighs an X subscription ladder topping out at a $100 Grok Ultra plan

A social lead who pays for a verified seat for every executive on the team is the easy case. Today the cheapest checkmark on X comes with Premium at $8 a month ^[14]. On the draft ladder Bloomberg described, it comes with Lite at the same $8, so her bill would not move ^[2][16].

Digital Trends ran the story under the headline "X is apparently cooking up a cheaper verified badge" ^[8]. Its own copy says the Lite tier "isn't basically a cheaper route to verification than today's Premium subscription" ^[9]. The copy has the numbers right: verification starts at $8 on both ladders ^[16].

The described tiers, pitched as a combined chatbot and social subscription, mostly change what Grok costs. The free tier keeps the chatbot, with stricter usage limits ^[10]. At the top sits Grok Bot, an agent built to perform tasks on a user's behalf ^[4]. It already comes with the $40 Premium+ plan, alongside SuperGrok and an almost ad-free experience ^[15]. If Ultra becomes its only home, access to the agent costs $60 more a month, two and a half times today's price ^[22]. That holds unless the fourth tier, which Bloomberg's report leaves out, includes it ^[11].

X has raised its top Grok price once already. Premium+ went from $22 to $40 a month after the Grok 3 launch in 2025 ^[17]. A $100 Ultra would be about four and a half times the pre-Grok-3 price ^[21].

SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit that makes Grok and runs X ^[7], is competing with Anthropic and OpenAI to sign up business customers, Bloomberg reported ^[18]. The rival ladders run higher. OpenAI added a $500 ChatGPT plan this week and halved usage on its $200 Pro plan ^[12]. Meta One, launched worldwide this month, runs from $2.99 to $499 a month ^[13]. X's proposed ceiling is a fifth of OpenAI's ^[20].

Neither report includes figures on how many subscribers use Grok or how long they keep paying, so the useful evidence for a team is its own seat list. A workable version has one line per seat, naming the feature whose loss would draw a complaint. Each line then answers two questions: whether the seat exists for the checkmark or for Grok's output, and whether its user runs tasks through Grok Bot or only chats.

A checkmark seat with no agent use lands on Lite at today's price ^[16]. A chat-only seat that never needed the badge is the one the free tier might absorb, once SpaceXAI publishes its limits ^[10]. A $3 Basic seat bought for post editing and longer uploads has nowhere obvious to go, because none of the three priced tiers costs $3 ^[19]. Any seat that uses Grok Bot, with or without the badge, I would budget at $100 until the fourth tier's contents are known ^[3]. The tradeoff is over-budgeting by as much as $60 a seat a month if that tier turns out to include the agent ^[22].