Grok Imagine image: xAI $0.02 to $0.05 vs Runway 4 to 8 credits

On xAI's own API, a Grok Imagine image costs $0.02 for grok-imagine-image, $0.05 for the quality tier and $0.04 for 2.0. Runway sells grok_imagine_image_2 at 4 to 8 credits, $0.04 to $0.08. So Runway's low end matches the xAI 2.0 price and its high end is double it. Sume's router default for its Grok image model is $0.025.

Prices are from the xAI models page and the Runway pricing guide, both read 2026-10-04.

What the credits mean

Runway credits are $0.01 each, so 4 credits is $0.04 and 8 credits is $0.08. The xAI page lists $0.04 for 2.0, which is the same dollar amount as Runway's 4 credits. Runway does not publish a single flat price for this model; it scales between 4 and 8 credits, so the high end is 8 / 4 = 2.0x its low end and 0.08 / 0.04 = 2.0x xAI 2.0.

Sume's default for the Grok image model is a provider list of $0.02 times the 1.25 margin, $0.025, so 1,000 images is $25.00. Compare that with the xAI $0.02 row, where the 1.25 margin is the whole gap.

Which is cheapest

• Cheapest: xAI's grok-imagine-image at $0.02.
• Same model line with 2.0 quality: xAI direct at $0.04.
• Convenience: Runway or Sume, where the image can feed a video step in the same account.

Steps

• Run the same prompt on the first-generation and 2.0 models and compare.
• Estimate your image count and multiply by the per-image price in the table.
• Add retries: at two tries per keeper, double the total.
• Re-read the pages before a large batch.

A 10,000-image run

Ten thousand images cost $200 on xAI's first tier, $400 on its 2.0 tier, $500 on its quality tier, $400 to $800 on Runway and $250 on Sume's router default. The Runway range is as wide as the whole spread between the xAI tiers, so confirm which setting you are buying before a large run.

Caveats

The tier names and what drives Runway's 4 to 8 credit range are not given in the table I read, so I could not say which settings cost more. Prices read on 2026-10-04.