20+ hours each with Grok Bot and Muse: smarter but $200/mo vs $16/mo for a solopreneur
jonathanmalkin · reddit · 2026-10-14
A solopreneur ran their business on Grok Bot and then Muse for a week each, and stayed on Muse.
Price: Muse wins easily. Free tier gives 100M tokens/week, $16/month buys 500M, $80/month 3B; actual usage of a few hundred million tokens/week was never a concern. Grok Bot burned through free, then $20, $60, and $200/month plans before switching to X's $30 unified bundle.
Why Grok Bot costs so much: frequency (an email-check job every 5-10 min ate half the $20 plan alone), context re-reads (85-97% of tokens on bigger jobs were re-read rules/files), and length (runs over 15 steps produced 52% of weekly cost).
Smarts: Grok Bot for now — it handles more planning and judgment itself, while Muse's Spark models offload that to Claude. Musk has announced Grok Bot will route each task to the best back-end model, including Claude Opus 5.5.
Architecture: six bots (chief of staff, builder, writing/social, relationships, research, coach) with job descriptions, shared rules, and personalities in one repo both agents can read — this made switching possible. Procedural bots work better as skills; separate bots matter for focused context, distinct personas/memory, and per-bot schedules, spend, and permissions for auditing.
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