Joachim DC

I'm a Grok @Bot fan. I also can't keep paying for it like this. Since August, I've gone all in. I built a team of 24 bots to run my business, and I've told everyone who would listen: newsletter subscribers, conference audiences, podcast hosts, and my mastermind members. Then something changed. No announcement. No explanation. Suddenly, the same work cost far more than it used to. This week I hit my weekly usage limit after just five days. That's never happened before. When it happens, Grok Bot keeps running on paid credits. On top of my $200 monthly subscription, I've spent more than $272 on extra usage. It's November 3. Here's what scares me. Under the new limits, I'm burning about $14 an hour. At 10 hours a day, that's $140 a day, or roughly $4,200 a month, plus the subscription. So I did what users do. I went looking for fixes. 1. Pause the routines. I paused 19 scheduled tasks this morning. It barely helped. Spending kept climbing. 2. Duplicate long-running bots. Others recommend copying a bot to start its conversation fresh. But the copy loses everything the bot has learned about you. 3. Rethink group chats. This turned out to be the real cost. Every message in a group chat wakes every bot in it, even the ones with nothing to say. Most of my usage now comes from conversations, not automation. Here's where we are. I'm moving shared project context out of group chats and into notes the bots read only when they need them. One lead bot per project. Fewer wake-ups. It's helping. But I shouldn't have to reverse-engineer the billing to use the product the way it's designed. Let me be clear. I'm not a freeloader. I don't expect free AI, and I'm happy to pay for real value. Grok Bot delivers real value. What I can't do is commit a business to a platform when I can't predict what it will cost from one week to the next. That uncertainty is the problem. The Grok Bot team has built something remarkable. I don't want to find an alternative, but I may have to. It all depends on whether SpaceXAI fixes this.