xAI Rolling Out Grok API for Developers, Offers $25 of Free Credits Per Month

xAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm founded by Elon Musk, rolled out an API for Grok on Monday. While the API was launched last month, the company has now offered several incentives for developers to try out the API and build apps and software using it. The most notable incentive on offer is free credits worth $25 (roughly Rs. 2,100) per month till the end of the year. The API key can be generated using the xAI console and users can further customise how to use it.

xAI Offers Grok API With Free Credits

Three weeks ago, Musk made a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) highlighting that the Grok API was live. However, it appears that did not get much traction from the developer community as the official handle of xAI on the social media platform separately announced the rolling out of the API as well as several freebies to gain the attention of developers.

For starters, any developer who signs up on the xAI console will get $25 worth of free credits every month. Given that two months are remaining till the end of 2024, developers can get a maximum of $50 (roughly Rs. 4,200) in API credits.

But that's not all. xAI is also rewarding any developer who has purchased prepaid credits for the API so far. In a blog post, the company said that any developer with purchased prepaid credits will get an equivalent amount of free monthly credits for every month until the end of the year.

This means if a developer has purchased $50 of prepaid credits, they will get $50 + $25 of total free credits in both November and December. Considering the xAI API costs $5 (roughly Rs. 420) per million input tokens and $15 (roughly Rs. 1261) per million output tokens, this is a significant reward for those willing to use the API.

The move also highlights the ongoing race of AI firms to capture the attention of the developer community. Since a wider adoption of an AI model is dependent on different apps and software running the large language model, developers have become an important entity for both ecosystem players as well as technology providers.

Apart from monetary incentives, xAI also highlighted that the company has made its REST API compatible with the ones offered by OpenAI and Anthropic. For instance, a developer using OpenAI Python SDK can change the base_url to https://api.x.ai/v1 and start building on the xAI API. This move also highlights the company's intention to reduce friction during migration from one system to another.