Random Reviews AI Showdown (4 of 5): five subscriptions, one wallet.
Grok: The Cheapest Brain in the Stack
The cheapest generalist in my stack. It used to own real-time news outright, then everyone else caught up, and I kept it anyway.
What it is, what I paid
Grok is xAI's chatbot, and I don't pay for it directly at all. It rides along with my X Premium subscription: $84 a year right now, about $7 a month, and back in December 2024 I caught it on a Black Friday deal for $50.40 for the year. That's $4.20 a month. For an AI subscription. One note for the shoppers: X Premium raises Grok's limits, but it isn't the standalone SuperGrok plan ($30/month), which gets higher ceilings and stronger media features. Premium is the budget door into Grok's world, and it's a very cheap door.
How I actually used it
Grok tells me I've had around 174 conversations with it since May of this year, averaging one or two chats a day, with busy stretches and quiet ones. I had it sort its memory of those into themes, and the picture leans heavily toward research: personal finance decisions, health questions tied to real choices, career strategy, technical topics, verifying current events. The pattern is usually the same: long, multi-turn fact-finding on things where getting it wrong has consequences.
That said, it's very much a generalist for me, covering a lot of the same ground as ChatGPT. ChatGPT just gets the daily-driver nod. Grok is the one I open when I want a second brain on something, or when I want to see what the less-filtered answer looks like.
What's great
Real-time awareness used to be Grok's killer feature. The X integration meant breaking news and developing stories were just there, no cutoff-date apologies. Credit where it's due: the others have gotten much better at this than they used to be, so the gap has narrowed. It's still good at it, just no longer alone in it.
What hasn't narrowed: it's less filtered, which for research mostly cuts the right way. Fewer refusals, more direct answers. The image generation is notably less restrictive too, including with public figures. And voice mode is solid.
What annoyed me
Honestly? Not much. It's a pretty good generalist that isn't as feature-rich as ChatGPT. That's the whole complaint list. It doesn't have the app ecosystem, the breadth of tools, the polish. But I didn't buy the budget door expecting the penthouse.
Verdict: ★★★★
Four stars. In my stack, Claude is the workhorse, ChatGPT is the generalist, Google is the bundle bonus, Grok is the budget generalist, and Muse is the agent. Ask me again next month.