The coding assistant market just got a free speed run. xai's grok code fast 1, out september 16,…
the coding assistant market just got a free speed run. xai's grok code fast 1, out september 16, hits 92 tokens a second for free across major platforms.
the paid tier now has to justify itself.
Context
xAI's launch post for grok-code-fast-1 is dated 28 August 2025. It says the model was free for a limited time with launch partners including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cline, Roo Code, Kilo Code, opencode and Windsurf, priced at 0.20 dollars per million input tokens and 1.50 per million output. xAI's docs page now titles the model Grok Build 0.1, with grok-code-fast-1 as an alias, and a 256,000 token context. A secondary PromptLayer post of 28 August 2025 gives about 92 tokens per second.
The first-party launch is August 2025 and no first-party event dated 16 September 2026 was found; whether a new free window or rename happened then is unresolved, since the docs page is undated. The 92 tokens per second comes from the secondary post only, and the first-party chart figure read was 190, which was not matched to the same measurement. The launch said free for a limited time, and later free windows on specific platforms were seen only in snippets, so free across major platforms in September 2026 is not shown. The vendor's speed and price chart is its own comparison.
Watch next
- A first-party September 2026 release note and what the grok-build-0.1 rename covers.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 21 September 2026 at 16:32 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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