Grok Bot usage limits cut as costs outrun revenue, despite 800,000 paid weekly users

Subscribers to SpaceX’s Grok Bot woke up over Halloween weekend to find their allowances gone, and the tighter Grok Bot usage limits were no glitch. Elon Musk confirmed on X on Sunday that the cost of running the AI agent had become a problem. “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue,” he wrote in reply to a user.

What users saw over the weekend

Several subscribers reported that their weekly usage meters leapt without any extra activity on their part. One user’s meter reportedly went from 33% to 66%, and others said theirs jumped from as low as 50% to 100%. On Cursor’s community forum, which is relevant because SpaceX acquired the coding platform earlier this year, users described meters flipping between 77% and 100%.

Cursor did report a billing and usage-dashboard problem on Sunday, later marked as resolved. Reporting so far doesn’t establish whether that bug had anything to do with the jumps, and Musk’s comments point to a deliberate change in allowances rather than a technical fault.

What Musk actually said

Musk’s replies were brief. To one user he asked whether the cost increase for a higher-usage plan was “too high?” In another, he described reducing allowances and telling users about it as “just being sensible.” He has not published a figure for what the agent costs to run, and he hasn’t said how subscribers’ limits will look going forward. According to reports, his main X feed has stayed focused on promoting the product, including as a tool for buying family gifts.

Some users were less forgiving. TechRadar reported that critics were calling the move a “rug pull,” a charge that tends to stick when people have paid for a plan and then find it delivers less than expected.

A hit product with a cost problem

The timing is awkward because Grok Bot has been held up as a success story. Launched in August, it is an agent that uses a virtual computer to carry out tasks such as shopping, with plans ranging from free to $200 a month. On SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call, the company said it had 800,000 paid weekly users in early October, more than double the previous month. Musk called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and suggested it could end up consuming most of the compute in the company’s Super Intelligence division.

That growth is the likely source of the strain. Agents that run multi-step tasks on a virtual computer use far more processing than a simple chat reply, so each new heavy user adds to the bill. Weekly caps that refresh are a standard way to stop a handful of power users from racking up huge costs, and the cap is the lever SpaceX appears to have pulled.

The company’s wider finances make the admission notable. A filing last month said AI now accounts for 52% of SpaceX income, and the Super Intelligence division posted a $431 million profit, rare in the AI industry. That figure would have been higher without $1.2 billion in one-time costs tied to the Cursor acquisition. Grok Bot’s economics may be a different story from the division’s overall results, and the sources do not break them out.

Changing plans and mixed messages

SpaceX has also been reshaping what subscribers get. It recently announced that Grok Bot would be folded into a new $8-a-month “X subscription” that includes X Premium and Cursor. In October, Musk said the agent would also draw on outside models, including Claude, Midjourney and Suno, which could add further costs depending on how those partnerships are priced.

Musk also left himself open to mockery. Users circulated his recent claim that saving money is pointless because AI will bring abundance, setting it beside his new insistence on being “sensible” about costs.

An industry-wide squeeze

SpaceX isn’t alone in rationing. Meta has not said what its Muse agent costs to run, but Mark Zuckerberg told investors last month it is “very compute-intensive” and not yet profitable, even with more than 10 million users. OpenAI plans to merge its separate ChatGPT and Codex allowances next month, which could mean people who use both hit their caps sooner. It said higher-paying subscribers would get bigger allowances but made no such promise for cheaper plans.

The pattern suggests the industry is still working out how to price agents that do real work. For Grok Bot subscribers, the open questions are how far the Grok Bot usage limits will fall, whether they can be reset, and whether the $200 tier will offer enough headroom to justify its price. Until SpaceX publishes details, users are left guessing.

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File photo: Elon Musk (54816836217) (cropped 2) (b).jpg by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.