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xAI Launches Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite at Rock-Bottom Prices

xAI released Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite, a low-cost video model priced at roughly 2 cents per second for 480p. Artificial Analysis benchmarks soon showed it outperforming Veo 3.1 at about one-third the price.

2026-10-08 ~ 2026-10-09 · 2 episodes · 8 posts

Episode 1 · xAI Launches Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite Starting at $0.02/Second (2026-10-08, 5 posts)

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

Episode 2 · Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite Beats Veo 3.1 Ranking at One-Third the Price (2026-10-09, 3 posts)

Artificial Analysis evaluated xAI's low-cost Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Lite, which ranked ahead of Veo 3.1 on the AA-Video-T2V-Silent v2.0 benchmark while costing about one-third the price, topping the speed-quality frontier.