Grok Imagine API: Models, Pricing, and Image 2.0 Status

The Grok Imagine Image 2.0 API is live, and the model is available in Dream Pixel Forge now.

This guide covers current pricing, rate limits, and how to use Image 2.0 today. For the release itself, see the Imagine Image 2.0 launch post.

Is the Grok Imagine Image 2.0 API available yet?

Yes. xAI launched Image 2.0 in its apps on August 7, 2026, and API access followed on August 8. The model ID is grok-imagine-image-2.0 on xAI's own API, and xai/grok-imagine-image-2.0 through the Vercel AI Gateway, which is the route Dream Pixel Forge calls it on. Grok Imagine 2.0 is live in Dream Pixel Forge now.

Grok Imagine API pricing, per model

xAI prices images per image and video per second, and bills inputs separately from outputs. That second part is the line item that surprises people running edit-heavy workloads, because an edit pays for both the image you send and the image you get back. Current published rates:

A few readings of that table that matter more than the numbers themselves.

The standard image model is absurdly cheap for exploration. Two cents per output image, and the API lets you "configure output count (up to 10 images per request)". Ten variations of one prompt costs twenty cents and one round trip. That is the single best argument for the API over the consumer app, where you get a subscription and an unpublished daily cap instead of a meter.

The quality tier is 2.5x the standard tier at 1K and 3.5x at 2K. That gap is large enough that routing every job to quality is a real budget decision, not a rounding error. Use the standard model for iteration and reserve the quality tier for the render you ship.

The two video models are not a simple old-and-new pair. grok-imagine-video-1.5 is the newer and more expensive one at $0.080 per second, and it takes text and image input. But only grok-imagine-video accepts video as an input modality, which is what reference-to-video and video extension need. Picking the higher version number is not automatically picking the more capable model for your job.

Grok Imagine API rate limits and regions

xAI publishes per-model rate limits for its existing models: both image models are capped at 5 requests per second, while both video models allow 10 requests per second. A separate limit for Image 2.0 has not been published.

Regions differ per model, and this is easy to miss. Per xAI's model pages, grok-imagine-image and grok-imagine-video are available in us-east-1, us-west-2, and us-saltlake-2, while grok-imagine-image-quality and grok-imagine-video-1.5 are listed only in us-east-1 and us-west-2. If you have a region pinned for latency or data-residency reasons, check it before you assume a model swap is a one-word change.

What the Grok Imagine API actually exposes

Four endpoints, all under https://api.x.ai/v1:

• POST /images/generations for text to image, with configurable output count, aspect ratio, resolution, and a URL or base64 response format.
• POST /images/edits for editing, which per xAI's docs supports "up to 3 source images in a single request for combining subjects, transferring styles, and composing scenes". Source images go in as a public URL or a base64 data URI.
• POST /videos/generations for video, with duration configurable up to 15 seconds. It returns a request id.
• GET /videos/{REQUEST_ID} to poll that job until it finishes.

Full size

On billing behavior, xAI is explicit that "image edits are billed for both the input image and the generated output image." An edit-heavy loop therefore costs roughly 10 percent more per call than the headline output price on the standard model, and about 20 percent more on the quality tier at 1K. Budget accordingly if your product is an editor rather than a generator.

Getting a Grok Imagine API key

Keys come from the xAI developer console, and the client story is deliberately boring: the API is compatible with the OpenAI SDK, so you point an existing OpenAI client at https://api.x.ai/v1 with your xAI key and most of your code stays put. xAI also ships its own xai_sdk Python package, and Grok models are resold through Azure AI Foundry, Oracle OCI Generative AI, and Google Cloud Vertex AI Model Garden if procurement prefers an existing vendor relationship.

The parts that are genuinely on you: key storage and rotation, retry and backoff against those per-second limits, polling loops for video, moving returned URLs into your own storage before they expire, and validating that what came back matches what you asked for. None of that is hard. All of it is code you write once per integration and then maintain forever.

Using Grok Imagine without wiring the API yourself

If you want to use the model without building and maintaining an API integration, Grok Imagine 2.0 is live in Dream Pixel Forge now, for generation and editing alike.

Two surfaces, one account and one credit balance. The MCP endpoint at /api/mcp gives any MCP-capable client (Claude, Codex, or your own agent) tools like generate_image, edit_image, and generate_video directly. The dpf CLI is a zero-dependency npm package (npx dreampixel-cli login) that wraps the identical calls over HTTPS for anything that would rather shell out than speak MCP. The login flow mints the key on your machine and sends only its SHA-256 hash to the server, so a leaked server log yields a hash rather than a usable credential. The details are in the CLI guide and the agent API post.

Select Grok Imagine 2.0 in the image generator and start creating.

When the raw API is still the right call

Plenty of cases, and it is worth being straight about them. Go direct to xAI when you need the exact per-call cost on your own invoice, when you want the 10-images-per-request batching for a research or evaluation loop, when you need a specific model id and region pinned for compliance, or when generation is your core product and the routing logic is a thing you want to own. Two cents an image is hard to beat when you are prepared to build everything around it.

Go through a routed surface when generation is a feature inside a larger product, when an agent is the caller and you would rather it get a validated result than an image URL and a retry policy, or when you want to A/B Grok against Nano Banana and GPT Image without maintaining three integrations. Model comparisons are in the Grok Imagine prompt guide, which also covers the reference aspect-ratio trap that quietly distorts edit inputs on the standard model, and the Grok image editing guide for the multi-image edit workflow specifically.

The short version

Grok Imagine Image 2.0 is available now, and it is live in Dream Pixel Forge.