Grok Voice 3.0 Pricing: $0.08/min API Cost Breakdown

Grok Voice 3.0 Price Guide: $0.08 per Minute, $4.80 per Hour

Grok Voice 3.0 costs $0.08 per minute ($4.80 per hour) of speech-to-speech audio through the SpaceXSI (formerly xAI) Voice Agent API. Text inputs cost an extra $0.004 each. That is the same price as Grok Voice 2.0. The model launched on October 14, 2026 as grok-voice-3.0, and the grok-voice-latest alias now points to it. Prices on this page are current as of October 16, 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Headline rate: $0.08 per minute, or $4.80 per hour, confirmed in the official SpaceXSI announcement ("at the same price as its predecessor") and in the Artificial Analysis launch evaluation.
• Text surcharge: $0.004 per text input, according to developer writeups that quote xAI's pricing page.
• No price change: Grok Voice 2.0 users who move to Grok Voice 3.0 pay the same rate. The API endpoint, session parameters, and events are unchanged.
• Cost per Task: In Artificial Analysis's Big Bench Audio run, Grok Voice 3.0 costs $0.025 per task, compared with $0.030 for GPT-Live-1 (Astra, Medium) and $0.055 for GPT-Realtime-2.1 (High).
• Quality at that price: The model is #1 on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Index with a score of 86.9, ahead of GPT-Live-1 at 83.2 and Gemini 3.8 Live at 82.6.

Grok Voice 3.0 Pricing Breakdown

Grok Voice 3.0 is a speech-to-speech model billed by audio minute. It streams audio and text in both directions over a WebSocket, as described in the Speech to Speech docs.

Source: @0x0SojalSec

Item	Price (as of Oct 16, 2026)	Source / note
Speech-to-speech audio (grok-voice-3.0)	$0.08 / minute	SpaceXSI announcement
Hourly equivalent	$4.80 / hour	$0.08 × 60 min
Text input	$0.004 per text input	xAI pricing page, as quoted in developer writeups
grok-voice-latest alias	$0.08 / minute	Points to Grok Voice 3.0 as of Oct 14, 2026
Grok Voice 2.0 (deprecated)	$0.08 / minute	Retirement date not yet announced
Volume / enterprise discounts	Not yet announced	Custom rate limits are offered through Contact Sales
Per-voice or reasoning-effort price differences	Not yet announced	Reasoning defaults to "high" with no published price change

Other Voice API products are billed differently. An August 13, 2026 snapshot of the xAI API page listed Text to Speech at $15.00 per 1M characters, Speech to Text at $0.10 per hour (REST) and $0.20 per hour (Streaming), and Speech to Speech "starting at $0.05 / min". That snapshot is older than the Grok Voice 3.0 launch. SpaceXSI has not explained how the $0.05 "starting at" figure relates to the $0.08 rate for Grok Voice 3.0.

What That Costs in Practice

All of the figures below are calculated from the published $0.08-per-minute rate and the reported $0.004 text-input charge. Call lengths and volumes are example assumptions. They are not vendor data.

Scenario	Formula	Estimated cost
One 3-minute support call	3 min × $0.08	$0.24
One hour of continuous conversation	60 min × $0.08	$4.80
10,000 minutes per month (small support queue)	10,000 × $0.08	$800 / month
One line open 24/7 for 30 days	1,440 min × 30 × $0.08	$3,456 / month
20,000 calls per day at an assumed 3 min each	60,000 min × $0.08	$4,800 / day
1,000 text inputs added to a session mix	1,000 × $0.004	$4.00

The 20,000-calls-per-day row uses the Starlink volume that SpaceXSI cites. The Verge quotes the announcement: Starlink call centers answer 20,000 calls a day with Grok Voice, and roughly 70% are resolved without a human. The 3-minute average call length is an assumption made for this page. SpaceXSI has not published call durations.

For most teams, the per-minute meter matters more than the text surcharge. At $0.004 each, 250 text inputs cost $1.00, which is the price of 12.5 audio minutes.

A community framing that circulated on launch day compares the $4.80 hourly rate with a cited ~$21.53 per hour median US customer-service wage (@AIRoboticsInt). That works out to roughly 4.5× cheaper per hour. The comparison leaves out integration work, escalation staff, and calls the model fails to resolve.

How Grok Voice 3.0 Pricing Compares

SpaceXSI says Grok Voice 3.0 "costs less than other frontier models." The data behind that claim is Artificial Analysis's cost-per-task measurement on Big Bench Audio, which SpaceXSI published in its announcement.

Model	Cost per Task (Big Bench Audio, USD)	AA Speech-to-Speech Index	Time to first audio
Grok Voice 3.0	$0.025	86.9	0.81 s
GPT-Live-1 (Astra, Medium)	$0.030	83.2	1.34 s
GPT-Realtime-2.1 (High)	$0.055	Not yet confirmed	Not yet confirmed
Gemini 3.8 Live (Ext. Thinking, High)	Not yet confirmed	82.6	Not yet confirmed
Grok Voice 2.0	Not yet confirmed	81.3	0.70 s

Cost-per-task and index figures come from the SpaceXSI announcement, which credits Artificial Analysis data dated October 13, 2026. The latency figures come from a launch summary by @0xLogicrw.

On Big Bench Audio, Grok Voice 3.0 completes a task for about 17% less than GPT-Live-1 ($0.025 vs $0.030) and about 55% less than GPT-Realtime-2.1 ($0.025 vs $0.055).

The cheaper model does not win on every benchmark. On τ-Voice, the support-call benchmark, GPT-Live-1 still leads with 74.5% against Grok Voice 3.0's 71.6%. SpaceXSI's response is that Grok Voice 3.0 reaches comparable τ-Voice results with 40% lower latency. Our earlier look at GPT Live 1's full-duplex design covers what OpenAI's side of that trade looks like.

One community dubbing test put Grok Voice at $0.012 against $0.111 for GPT Audio on the same script, about 9× cheaper (@thehypedotnews). That is a single unverified test, and the methodology was not published.

Free Tier, Limits, and Access

Where Grok Voice 3.0 runs: the Voice Agent API, the Voice Agent Builder, Grok Bot's voice mode, Grok in Tesla vehicles, and Starlink customer support, according to SpaceXSI. Developers connect at wss://api.x.ai/v1/realtime and pick the model with a query parameter. The docs show model=grok-voice-latest, and a versioned name such as grok-voice-3.0 pins a specific release.

Free access: The announcement page has a "Try It Free" button. No free API credit allowance for Grok Voice 3.0 has been published. Consumer-side pricing (Grok Bot or X subscription plans that include voice) is not tied to Grok Voice 3.0 in any official source reviewed for this page.

Rate limits: The xAI API page says self-serve accounts get "automatically increasing rate limits" and enterprise accounts get custom rate limits, invoiced billing, SSO, and data residency options. A third-party review reports two changes since Grok Voice 2.0: concurrency moved from a fixed 10 concurrent calls in one US region to a spend-based ladder that reaches 200, and an EU region was added. SpaceXSI has not confirmed this in the sources reviewed here.

Migration cost: The upgrade from Grok Voice 2.0 is free. The grok-voice-latest alias switched automatically, and the API surface did not change. Reasoning is on by default with effort set to "high", and it can be set to "none". No price difference between the two settings has been published.

Grok Voice 3.0 is speech-to-speech in a single model. Teams that run a separate text-to-speech stage for narration or outbound prompts can compare per-character pricing on a model like Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS, which is a different modality with a different billing unit.

What We Don't Know Yet

• Volume tiers: No discount schedule, committed-use pricing, or minimum spend has been published for $0.08 per minute.
• The $0.05 "starting at" figure: The pre-launch xAI API page listed Speech to Speech at "starting at $0.05 / min". It is unclear whether a cheaper configuration exists for Grok Voice 3.0.
• Per-voice pricing: Artificial Analysis benchmarked only the "Rex" voice. No source says whether cloned or custom voices cost more.
• Telephony costs: SIP phone calls are supported. Carrier charges are separate, and SpaceXSI has published no SIP surcharge.
• Cost per resolved call: Cost per task on Big Bench Audio is not the same as the cost of resolving a real support call. No public figure for cost per resolved call exists yet.
• Grok Voice 2.0 retirement date: The model is deprecated, but no shutdown date has been announced.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Grok Voice 3.0 cost per minute?

Grok Voice 3.0 costs $0.08 per minute of speech-to-speech audio through the Voice Agent API. Developer writeups quoting xAI's pricing page add a $0.004 charge per text input.

How much does the Grok Voice 3.0 API cost per hour?

Grok Voice 3.0 costs $4.80 per hour, which is $0.08 × 60 minutes. Text inputs are billed separately at $0.004 each.

Is Grok Voice 3.0 free?

No, not for API use. API access is billed at $0.08 per minute. The announcement page has a "Try It Free" button, and the model powers Grok Bot's voice mode, but no free API credit allowance has been published.

Is Grok Voice 3.0 cheaper than GPT-Live-1?

Yes, per task. In Artificial Analysis's Big Bench Audio run, Grok Voice 3.0 costs $0.025 per task, against $0.030 for GPT-Live-1 (Astra, Medium) and $0.055 for GPT-Realtime-2.1 (High).

Did Grok Voice 3.0 get more expensive than Grok Voice 2.0?

No. SpaceXSI released Grok Voice 3.0 at the same $0.08-per-minute price as Grok Voice 2.0, and grok-voice-latest users were moved over with no price change.

Are there extra charges beyond the per-minute rate?

Yes, text inputs are billed at $0.004 each, according to writeups quoting xAI's pricing page. Volume discounts, minimums, and per-voice price differences have not been published.

What to watch next

Three signals will change this page. The first is whether xAI's pricing page adds volume tiers or explains the $0.05 "starting at" Speech to Speech figure. The second is a retirement date for Grok Voice 2.0, which would set a deadline for pinned integrations. The third is OpenAI's API pricing for GPT-Live-1.1, which was announced on October 15, 2026 with API access "coming soon" and will reset the cost-per-task comparison. For broader context on the Grok family, see how Grok 4.7 compares with Claude Opus 5.

Try related models on Kie.ai: Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS.