Grok Imagine now locked behind Premium subscription, days after Ask Grok was restricted for free users [Updated]

Update 23/03/26 – 06:24 pm (IST): To clarify, Grok Imagine is not limited to SuperGrok subscribers only. Even though users see a pop-up to subscribe to SuperGrok, users who have a Premium or Premium+ subscription on X can also use the feature.

Update 23/03/26 – 10:24 am (IST): We finally have some form of an official confirmation that Grok Imagine is indeed a paid-only feature, at least for the foreseeable future (h/t u/Adventurous-Ad-4748). An xAI employee, @YknZhu on X, responded to a user’s question about why free users can’t use Grok Imagine by stating that it’s now paid-only due to the growth in users.

In another response, the employee confirmed that this will be the case in the near term, but they can’t predict if xAI will reverse the decision later.

Update 20/03/26 – 11:54 am (IST): Someone on Reddit surfaced a post from Elon Musk when Grok Imagine first went live for everyone. In the post, Musk specifically mentioned: “Grok Imagine’s super fast image and video generation is now available free worldwide for a limited time.” The key here is the last two words, “limited time.”

So xAI had always planned to cut off free access to Grok Imagine eventually. And it seems like they’ve decided that now’s the time to get people to pay up.

Original article published on March 19, 2026, follows:

Users across social media platforms are reporting that Grok Imagine has now been locked behind a paywall, and you need to buy a SuperGrok subscription to use it. It doesn’t work for basic image generation, and it doesn’t work for creating short video clips either.

I have tried this myself, and with a free account, Grok Imagine no longer works. Until you enter the prompt to generate the image or select the image to edit, it works as expected. But after you hit enter, it immediately gives you a pop-up for SuperGrok, with options for monthly or yearly subscriptions. It affects both iOS and Android.

If you exit out of the pop-up, you’ll be greeted with a “Failed to respond” error at the bottom. You may also observe that the images have actually been generated, but they appear completely blurred out, and they’re not available for use. This is a weird limitation, since it’s generating the image but blurring it out, which theoretically wastes compute.

If you still want to generate images, you can do so by prompting Grok in the normal chat section to generate an image, instead of the “Imagine” section. This has been tried and tested at the time of writing, but your results may vary if xAI decides to block image generation within the chat.

It appears to have happened just a few hours ago, since people report that it was working perfectly fine this morning. This is an age-old business playbook, where companies provide a service for free and get users hooked on it, and then proceed to put a paywall on it to make more money. We’ve seen Google do this with Google Photos and Cloud. X is following the same playbook with Grok.

It looks like more and more features of Grok are getting paywalled lately. Recently, they’ve quietly made the ‘Ask Grok’ feature premium-only as well, which you can read about here. We haven’t independently been able to verify if the feature has been paywalled in all regions, but if we take Ask Grok as an example, it’s likely that Grok Imagine isn’t available for free use anywhere right now.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.