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xAI's new video model costs 60% more per second — and is the one model its own batch discount refuses

xAI's developer documentation now lists two generations of its video model side by side, and the gap between them is not only technical. Grok Imagine Video 1.5, whose full set of modes was announced on 31 July 2026, is billed at $0.080 per second of generated footage. The first-generation grok-imagine-video remains on the price list at $0.050 per second — a 60 percent difference for the newer model. What the higher rate buys is a native 1080p pipeline for text-to-video and image-to-video, rather than a lower-resolution render enlarged afterwards, plus a reference mode that guides a clip with several images without locking the opening frame, and the option to attach up to three preset voices to the subject. Clips run from one to fifteen seconds; separate endpoints extend an existing clip from its last frame or edit one, the latter capped at 720p and about 8.7 seconds. The less advertised part sits in the batch documentation. xAI's Batch API, which processes large volumes asynchronously at a discount, accepts image and video requests only for the first-generation grok-imagine-image and grok-imagine-video models. Both 1.5-generation models — the video model and Grok Imagine Image 2.0 — are turned away with an explicit "not supported for batch processing" error. For anyone generating footage in bulk, the newer model is therefore dearer twice over: a higher per-second rate, and no access to the cheaper queue. The documentation also discloses how text-to-video actually works on this model. Rather than a single pass, xAI writes, the model generates a first frame from the prompt and then animates it; the intermediate image is never returned to the caller, though it is a single billable request.