Grok Is Now the Most Popular Model on Openrouter

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

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Grok has become the most popular model on OpenRouter, but commenters question the significance of this due to factors like free usage and potential biases in the data.

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Sep 29, 2025 at 10:32 AM EDT
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Discussion (46 comments)

Showing 36 comments of 46

pecord

3 months ago

3 replies

Little miss leading as it is sorted by number of output tokens, and I’ve heard Grok is rather verbose.

tripplyons

3 months ago

1 reply

Sorting by revenue would definitely move Grok down. The top 2 Grok models listed are very cheap or even free right now.

slowmovintarget

3 months ago

1 reply

Isn't that a good thing?

tripplyons

3 months ago

Yes, I am a huge fan of the new Grok models!

_blk

3 months ago

It's very verbose even when prompted to remain brief, but it's still not a bad model and I use it a lot.

odie5533

3 months ago

Maybe it's verbose internally? When I run it, it's just extremely fast. So the verbosity doesn't seem to affect things.

behnamoh

3 months ago

1 reply

Misleading because much of Grok's traffic is through their free endpoint. Title should be:

    Grok is the most popular free cloud model on OpenRouter

And even then this wouldn't matter because most devs don't use OpenRouter (commissions!, incompatible API in edge cases, etc.), and most LLM enthusiasts who want to run free models do it on their own machine.

---

Edit: Most → Much

raincole

3 months ago

> most of Grok's traffic is through their free endpoint

https://openrouter.ai/x-ai

Code Fast 1: 100B

Grok 4 (free): 84.6B

tripplyons

3 months ago

2 replies

The Grok 4 Fast and Grok Code Fast models have really impressed me. The only issue I've had is reaching a rate limit on the Grok 4 Fast model. Amazing pricing for highly capable models with good tool calling support.

odie5533

3 months ago

1 reply

They're definitely amazing for the price. I like that you can do quick back and forth with them. but they're not very smart. When I need something to actually analyze or write good code and not just refactor and move things around, they're not good for that.

tripplyons

3 months ago

Agreed. For harder tasks, I like to go to GPT 5 thinking mode, but I'm considering other options.

Some times I've had faster success with some of the larger Qwen3 models (480B and 235B variants). I like them in combination with the Repomix CLI to copy an entire project into context and get a response very quickly with some of the accelerated providers like Cerebras.

cendyne

3 months ago

Now that Cursor has moved towards a credits system, grok code fast is making the plan last while still being reasonable in inference time. GPT 5 and GPT 5 Codex actually moves my "amount remaining" bar in realtime while being incredibly slow.

blackhaj7

3 months ago

3 replies

I was hesitant to use Grok but have actually found it to be excellent and it has totally replaced ChatGPT for me now.

The biggest difference is that it isn’t sycophantic and will often tell me I am wrong when I am. This makes way more of a difference than I thought it would as I feel I can trust the results more (perhaps naively)

toenail

3 months ago

2 replies

Hrm, I've never used it, but maybe I should. I've really only used claude and chatgpt, but it's annoying with how they agree with whatever you feed them.

hn_throw2025

3 months ago

1 reply

I switched from OpenAI to Gemini a couple of months ago, and was impressed how it sticks to its guns if it thinks I'm wrong.

blackhaj7

3 months ago

Interesting, will check it out

blackhaj7

3 months ago

1 reply

I would recommend trialing it for a month instead of ChatGPT.

I still use Claude code for coding

toenail

3 months ago

1 reply

Claude has been super annoying in the last few weeks, I ask it a question and it always immediately starts to write or update code instead of answering.

blackhaj7

3 months ago

1 reply

Same experience here. Codex has been a nice alternative when Claude Code is being dumb

toenail

3 months ago

1 reply

Lol, I've just installed the grok cli and did exactly the same thing..

> I've started to merge scripta and scriptb into scriptc, how would you proceed?

> I've merged the scripts into scriptc

If I have to tell the AI with every prompt not to run ahead it stops being useful..

sshine

3 months ago

I don’t mind it because I can enable planning mode and it will (mostly) not modify things.

Claude will sometimes dump very exact file content into a plan.md when I ask it to write its plan down which is annoying.

didip

3 months ago

1 reply

ChatGPT truly has no moat. I already stopped using it and cancelled my payment. The got left behind so quickly.

motoxpro

3 months ago

As things tend toward commodity (e.g. one item being replaceable with another with not much, or no, difference) the thing that matters most is brand.

So to the contrary, ChatGPT has the ONLY moat so far. 5.8B page visits vs 148m and growing much faster on an absolute basis. https://www.similarweb.com/website/chatgpt.com/vs/claude.ai

rcarmo

3 months ago

1 reply

FYI, GPT-5 in GitHub Copilot has (almost) completely gotten rid of the “you’re absolutely right” and faux Californian enthusiasm those of us with a British English bias find so condescendingly irritating. ;)

I should try Grok for comparison then.

blackhaj7

3 months ago

Haha!

Ok, interesting - will revisit

lvl155

3 months ago

1 reply

I stopped using openrouter because it’s getting pretty shady. I rather spend my money and traffic on someone like Vercel.

blackhaj7

3 months ago

What is shady about it?

bn-l

3 months ago

1 reply

I am using it more than the disaster that is gpt5

rcarmo

3 months ago

1 reply

I’m curious as to why, since inside GitHub Copilot GPT-5 has been stellar lately. Are you using it directly? (I assume that the prompting strategy inside Copilot is the reason why it’s so good right now).

bn-l

3 months ago

It’s very slow. Extremely marginal improvement over o3. Sometimes falls short (after taking a lot longer). Lower the thinking amount and all marginal improvement evaporates.

TeeWEE

3 months ago

Is open router used a lot? I just use claude code, so this is a misrepresentation of what is actually the most popular model right?

dghlsakjg

3 months ago

50% of their tokens on grok code fast were consumed by kilocode users.

Kilocode has been giving away free grok code fast usage.

When the price comes up for 0 I will be curious to see if this trend holds.

xnx

3 months ago

Those stacked bar charts are data visualization malpractice. They would tell a much clearer story (who's #1, what are the trends, when did one overtake another) as regular line charts.

postepowanieadm

3 months ago

Because it's free for now.

spoaceman7777

3 months ago

It's free on OpenRouter, but paid on the official xAI API, for the moment.

So, I'd imagine that is inflating the numbers just a bit lol.

strangescript

3 months ago

Grok 4 fast is a legit model. Their code models, including supernova still aren't smart enough. Claude and Codex are ahead. Its definitely fast, but who cares if you have to re-prompt it or it hits issues it can't fix.

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