Grok

Consider two things: whether you need the X feed inside an answer and whether you have foreign access.

Who it is for. For people who live by the news and want to know what is being discussed right now: while answering, Grok searches the web and recent X posts and puts a source post card in the answer. None of the major chat assistants reads the X feed the same way.

Who else. For people who want images and video in the same window as chat: Imagine creates and edits right in the answer, and via API a second of video costs from $0.08 (docs.x.ai pricing, 05.09.2026). And for people who write in Russian: Russian is officially listed among the app languages.

Who it is not for. For people in Russia without foreign access: the site returns a denial from Russian addresses (tested 05.09.2026), the app is unavailable in the Russian App Store, and Russian cards do not work. And for people who need predictability: the vendor does not publish limits, and since June 2026 paid plans use a shared weekly allowance.

A fit: section 3 takes you from changing your address to your first question. Choosing between it and ChatGPT: the choice is in section 7.

What vibecoding isStarting from scratch: how to set tasks for agents with no coding experience

Four things in one window: chat with X search, images and video, voice, and a phone camera.

Chat with search. It handles an ordinary question like any chatbot, but for a question about today it turns on web and X search and answers with a link to a post. Think mode makes the model reason longer, while DeepSearch and DeeperSearch compile a source-based overview. Without search enabled, the model knows only what was in its training, as the vendor docs explicitly state.

Images and video. The Imagine tab creates from a description, edits an uploaded photo, and makes short clips. The Imagine Image 2.0 image model launched 07.08.2026 and ranks second after GPT-Image-2 in text-to-image arenas, while Imagine Video 1.5 makes video with native 1080p. Spicy mode generates nude content; the App Store app is rated 17+.

Voice and camera. You can talk to it aloud: speech recognition supports 25 languages, and a voice can be cloned from a short clip. A phone camera becomes a question: in official screenshots, it reads a road sign and explains why the road is closed, identifies a hummingbird from a photo, and analyzes a derivative graph from a textbook scan.

What else the vendor offers. A coding agent Grok Build builds apps directly in chat and has its own card. Grok Bot, an agent with its own computer, has been in beta since 11.08.2026. 3D companions Ani, Mika, Valentine, and Rudi were removed from the app on 01.09.2026; the vendor did not publish an official announcement, while the App Store description still promotes them. We did not run Grok on a task ourselves: capabilities are taken from vendor docs and official screenshots.

From Russia, there is only one route: first a foreign address, then standard registration without an X account.

Step 1. Change your Russian IP address to a foreign one: American, Dutch, or Kazakh. From addresses in Moscow and St Petersburg grok.com returns a 403 denial, while it opens immediately from Kazakh, German, and American nodes (test 05.09.2026, two runs). Sign-in through X is blocked by a second lock: the social network itself has been blocked in Russia since March 2022.

Step 2. Click Sign Up and register by email with a code, through Google, or through Apple. An X account is not required. Sources from early 2026 still said you could not get in without X, but by July practitioners had confirmed email sign-in.

Step 3. Ask your first question. Ask about today with search enabled, otherwise the model will answer from its training memory. Images and videos live in the Imagine tab next to the chat.

Apps. The app is not in the Russian App Store storefront; the nearest storefront that has it is Kazakhstan's (05.09.2026). In Google Play, the page with the Russian title "Grok - AI assistant" opens, but installation from a Russian account has not been confirmed. The vendor has no desktop apps for macOS or Windows.

Impostors. There are only four official addresses: grok.com, x.ai, docs.x.ai and x.com. Sites called "Grok in Russian" with "official" in the headline and Telegram bots resell someone else's key, and there is no official Grok bot on Telegram: the May 2025 deal fell through. Do not enter Google, Apple, or X passwords there; APK files from third-party sites are never official.

In Russian. Write in Russian and it will answer in Russian. Russian is on the app's official language list, while the grok.com web interface is in English.

Steps verified 05.09.2026 using HTTP tests from Russian and control nodes, the app listings in the App Store and Google Play, vendor docs, and practitioner guides

Three signals: the model is in the top dozen, its audience is mass-market, and demand in Russia is measured in hundreds of thousands of searches per month.

Artificial Analysis index. Grok 4.6 scores 61 points and ranks eleventh out of 201 models (AA card, 05.09.2026), while the index notes that it is slower and more verbose than its peers. Eleventh place, not first as the ads promise. The vendor's claimed benchmarks live in a closed blog, with no independent reproduction.

Storefronts. In the App Store: 4.88 from 1.38 million ratings; in Google Play: 4.9 from 3.77 million reviews and more than 100 million installs (automated capture 05.09.2026). There are no more public mass-market numbers: according to Similarweb, grok.com received 326 million visits in March 2026 and 245 million in May, while aggregators count about 117 million monthly active users.

Demand in Russia. "grok" is searched 136 thousand times a month, "grok" 127 thousand, and "grok download" 11 thousand (Wordstat, 05.09.2026). Both queries are noisy: they include both the verb "to grok" and the log filter with the same name. Grok's place among the assistants in our catalog is shown below the card title, while the full tool ranking is on the main page.

You do not have to pay for chat, but the vendor does not say exactly how much you get for free.

Free entry. grok.com markup shows a price of 0 dollars (05.09.2026), while free-tier limits are not published. Guides mention about ten requests per two hours, but that is their observation, not a vendor rule.

Paid tiers. SuperGrok Lite is about $10 per month, SuperGrok about $30, and SuperGrok Heavy about $300. All three are "about": the official subscription pricing is closed to machines, and the figures align across several guides and Wikipedia as of 05.09.2026. Since June 2026, paid plans draw from one shared weekly allowance: chat, Imagine, voice, and Grok Build all use the same pool.

Paying from Russia. Russian cards do not work, and you cannot pay through the Russian App Store because the app is not there. The usual routes are a foreign card or an intermediary, where a $30 subscription costs from 2,800 to 3,800 rubles. Details in the guide how to pay for AI services from Russia.

For developers. The API charges $2 per million input tokens and $6 for output with grok-4.6, with cached repeats at $0.50; after 200 thousand context tokens, the request price doubles. The smaller grok-4.3 costs $1.25 and $2.50 with a million-token context. An Imagine image starts at $0.04, and a second of video ranges from $0.08 in 480p to $0.25 in 1080p. You can top up from $5; ruble-denominated aggregators offer Grok models at a markup.

Three questions: where your data is stored, what to expect from the tone, and how much to trust the answers.

Data in the US. SpaceXAI operates from California, its privacy policy is not served to machines, and since 11.04.2025 the Irish regulator has been examining whether the model was legally trained on posts by users from the EU. The working rule is simple: do not upload contracts, personal data, or trade secrets to the chat, just as with any foreign service.

Tone and boundaries. The vendor itself calls "edginess" and a lack of censorship part of the product's positioning, and Imagine's Spicy mode is part of it too. For some this is a plus, for others a risk, and the risk has a history: in July 2025 the bot on X gave insulting answers, the company apologized and rewrote the system prompt, and since December 2025 a scandal over sexualized generated images of real people has continued. Indonesia and Malaysia temporarily banned the service in January 2026; investigations in the EU and UK are ongoing. Russia is not listed among the bans.

Answers need fact-checking. Without search enabled, the model does not know about events after training, as the vendor docs state directly, while an "answer from the live feed" inherits errors from the posts themselves. Verify figures and names against the source in the post card.

What is open. The vendor has published the assistant's system instructions in an open repository since May 2025, after a prompt-injection incident: a rare move for the industry that shows how the bot is instructed to behave. Only the weights for the old Grok-1 and Grok-2 are open; the current lineup is closed.

The choice is not "who is smarter," but "do you need the X feed inside the answer?"

Different workflows. ChatGPT wins through its ecosystem of add-ons and audience: 53.9% of assistant web traffic (Momentic, 05.2026). Grok wins on freshness: searching X while answering and video in the same window. The difference is not intelligence, but where each one looks.

Same barrier. Neither works directly from Russia, neither can be paid for with a Russian card, and neither vendor publishes exact free-tier limits. ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month versus about $30 for SuperGrok.

Who else is nearby. If the main question is "free and from Russia," the answer is neither Grok nor ChatGPT, but DeepSeek: it opens directly from Russia, chat is free, and it works without registration.

In three years, a bot inside a single social network became a standalone app with images and video, while the company that created it changed owners and name.