xAI Launches Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite Starting at $0.02/Second

Between October 8 and 9, xAI rolled out the video generation model Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite, first listing it on OpenRouter (slug: x-ai/grok-imagine-video-1.5-lite) before the official Grok account announced its availability on the Grok Imagine API. The model is positioned as the "workhorse" for text-to-video and image-to-video, emphasizing speed and affordability — it is currently xAI's cheapest video model.

Confirmed

• Pricing is per second: $0.02/sec for 480p, $0.03/sec for 720p, and $0.14/sec for 1080p
• A 15-second 720p video costs about 0.45 USD
• A steep price cut from the original Video 1.5, with the 480p tier starting at just 2 cents per second
• Available through both the Grok Imagine API and OpenRouter

Why it matters

• Low-resolution pricing dropping to the 2-cents-per-second level significantly lowers the barrier to video generation, making it attractive for batch generation, prototyping, and similar use cases
• The wide price gap between 1080p and lower tiers ($0.14/sec vs. $0.02/sec) reveals xAI's resolution-tiered pricing strategy

2026-10-08 ~ 2026-10-09 · 5 related posts

Full story(2 episodes)→

• Episode 1: xAI Launches Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite Starting at $0.02/Second(2026-10-08, 5 posts)
• Episode 2: Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite Beats Veo 3.1 Ranking at One-Third the Price(2026-10-09, 3 posts)

• [source] Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite hits OpenRouter at 2 cents per second, a quarter of the full model — tetsuoai · 2026-10-08
• [source] Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite launches: 15s 720p video for just $0.45 — XFreeze · 2026-10-09

3 near-duplicate retellings: hexiang · ZhitingHu · ZhitingHu