GrokBot credit usage: why it drains and how to save

When Elon Musk was presented with the problem, he said the cost of serving grabbot was unsustainably high relative to revenue. This is coming from the world's first trillionaire, which I find to be quite rich. And then recently, just about a couple days ago, they announced that Grogbot fixes for improved token efficiency and smarter behavior are underway. And we've got a bunch of comments to that thread. Lots of people are eagerly anticipating the changes that are actually going to increase the token efficiency, myself included.

This post currently has 7.5 million views on X. And over here it says, "We've reset weekly limits for all GrokBot users. Enjoy." Now, keep in mind this is something that they very rarely do. I think I've only gotten one credit usage reset in about 3 to 4 months since I've started using GrokBot. Luckily, I just got another one last night. So, I want to show you some of the ways that you can actually go ahead and conserve your token usage on GrokBot.

And we're going to be using X to do this. So, I've got a couple different tweets pulled up over here. This one has about 180,000 views currently. and it goes over the 12 ways to reduce your GrokBot token bill with copy and paste settings. So, it includes all the prompts that you would just paste directly into GrokBot to get started with.

So, one that I'm running right now is to go through all of my self-managed routines inside GrokBot, the ones that are running automatically, and it's running a full audit on those routines, and it's just figuring out any that I may want to pause because I want to conserve credits. So, that should get back relatively soon. And while this is running, we're just going to go through this article.

So, it says, "I burn 99% of my weekly GrokBot allowance in 3 days on the $200 per month ultra plan. 84% of my tokens were the bot rereading its own chat, which is quite surprising. We want to make sure to eliminate that as much as possible since it seems unnecessary." And it says inside the routine schedules, the custom rules and the spending cap worth setting up first takes about 10 minutes and your weekly usage lasts a lot longer. Here says usage is weekly.

You get a weekly grant that resets every week. Once it's gone, the bot just stops unless you've turned on ondemand usage. So that means you're going to have to be using API credits, which is considerably more expensive than just using your actual subscription. And if you're hitting limits all the time and you're dependent on GrokBot to actually get work done inside your business, that gets pretty annoying. So, we want to figure out how to actually go ahead and reduce the amount of usage.

Setting one, uh, one conversation per task. So, every turn the bot rereads the whole chat. So, that one chat you started on Monday and kept during random tasks into gets more expensive with every message that you send. So, this is kind of similar to like a context window, I believe. So, if we want to eliminate that, it says, "Hit plus and start fresh for each new task. Old chats cost nothing while they sit there, so no need to clean them up.

If you're deep into something, grab a handoff note first so the new chat isn't starting from zero." Setting number two is the wider routine schedules. This is the big one, uh, that an hourly schedule or a short interval can eat a week's usage in a day. So, that's exactly what we're doing over here. We're just running a full audit on all of the routines. is I've got I don't know how many of them.

There's got to be at least a couple dozen routines running in all of these different AI agents. So, I just want to run run a full audit on those and find any that can be disabled. That's going to probably make the biggest difference for my overall usage moving forward. And that's one of the things that he recommends inside this article. And by the way, this is somebody named Maestro on X.

So, if you want to check out Maestro, I would recommend reading through this guide in order to save on your usage credits. Here's the prompt that you would want to paste directly into GrokBot to go ahead and run through all of your routines and disable any of them that you don't necessarily need. Another setting you can turn on is to narrow event triggers. Routines can also fire on events.

So anytime, let's say you get a message in Slack or you push up a repo to GitHub and it's using them regularly, then that could fire off event triggers which you may want to pause. In my case, I don't really do a lot of that inside GrokBot, so we're going to skip past that one. Setting number four, pause what you do not use.

Says routines that don't run cost nothing, and the one that you set up for a launch 2 weeks ago, though, still firing every day until you pause it. Which of your routines produced nothing useful in the last seven days? List them with what they do on their last three runs and pause the ones I mark. Do not delete them. So, we could also just go ahead and put that in over here as well. So, it should just list them off right here.

And then I can go through individually and pause any of them that I don't want to run anymore. For example, my website is currently down. So, I don't need to be running those routines. So, pretty much all of these I've just gone ahead and paused since they don't need to be running right now. It's just wasting credits since, like I say, my website's currently down, and I don't need to run those until it's back up. Another setting is a dedicated bot for run.

Each routine belongs to one bot. If all your recurring jobs live on the bot you chat with all day, every schedule run piles into that already long conversation. So, this article recommends giving the routines their own bot and just call it routines and keep your main bot for the stuff you're doing right now. That's actually a really good idea.

And he doesn't provide a prompt for it, but I could just come over to GrokBot, my chief of staff, and say, "Can you create a separate bot specifically for the routines and just put all the routines in there to keep them separate from the individual bots?" A routines only bot doesn't exist in my current roster. So that's something you'd need to stand up on your end. Want me to draft the spec for what it should own so it's ready when you build it?

Yes, just go ahead and draft everything and just go ahead and create the bot and put all of the routines, dedicated routines into that bot. Drafting the full spec and moving every routine into that new bot. So that should just create a separate bot and put all the routines in it. And then I also want to make sure that they're still assigned to the original V bot so it doesn't get confused, which it should do quickly, but first it's going to ask for my approval to

make sure everything looks all right. Another setting that you can turn on is the small save test runs on desktop. Every routine has a test button. You can also turn off app tools the bot does not need. So in this case, we could just open up the the plugins over here and we can go through all of our enabled plugins. If it's not using any of these, you can just go ahead and turn them off.

A few of these have errors, so I could just go ahead and uninstall any of the plugins which are currently not functioning correctly. On browser list, I could probably just remove since I don't use that one. Super memory, I do use that one, but I don't think I really need it connected to Grogbot. So, we can turn that off. And yeah, so just make sure all of the plugins that you're not using are removed from GrokBot. That should also make a difference.

Another one is custom rules that ask before expensive actions. These decide which actions need your okay first. And if two rules clash, ask first. Ask me first before you open more than five web pages for one task. Start a sub agent. Rerun a step that already failed twice. Start any job you expect to take more than 5 minutes. So, we can just go ahead and set that up real quick. Hey, always ask. So, here we just set the rule.

I think we could just paste that in here. Uh, another one is handheavy coding to cursor cloud agents, which I'm already doing. All of my bots do that automatically. And then I also have Codex and claw code built directly into my GrokBot as well, so I can easily delegate to the the right model based on the task. I've already made a YouTube video showing how to set that up if you guys are interested and you can easily see everything that's going on with your cloud agents

directly through the cursor dashboard or you can also use uh the cursor app to do a lot of this stuff as well. This is included in all of the pro subscriptions. You will get access to your cursor cloud agents as well as the GrokBot. So that's definitely handy and nice to have. So it just says you know for coding work act as a coordinator write the task as a short spec hand the implementation to a cursor cloud agent and only review the results.

So you know GrokBot does a lot of that stuff behind the scenes automatically anyway. I don't think we would really need to add this prompt if you're doing a lot of coding work. It will just use its cursor cloud agents. And then I would also recommend building in codecs and claude code and maybe even OpenCode directly into your GrokBot as well and just hand it off to the appropriate model for the task. That also saves on your cursor uh cloud agent credits as well.

And then the setting number 10 is a spending cap that you set yourself. So here I would definitely not recommend turning on on demand monthly usage at all. Uh because this could be set to some insane number like $100 or $200. You want to make sure that this is turned off for sure because the API credits are going to be pretty outrageously expensive compared to your subscription plan. So definitely make sure that your ondemand monthly limit is turned off.

And you can also take a look through your GrokBot usage over here as well. I'm not really using that much from the routines. It's mostly coming from my chief of staff. That's where a lot of my usage is coming from. And you can also see the individual bots over here as well. So you can get a breakdown of everything that's going on between each of the bots as well as your main delegator bot or orchestrator bot. So that's definitely useful to see. Cursor as well.

You're going to want to make sure to have on demand spending turned off. I would highly recommend. And then yeah, so just make sure that's turned off and you should be good to go there. Setting number 11, check the meter before big jobs. Cursor's own advice, check your usage before you kick off anything big or long. It's under settings, usage, and billing. You want to make sure that it's not maxed out before you kick off another task, especially one that's a heavy workload.

Uh that's going to max everything out even faster. And setting number 12, tight task briefs with a stop condition. The doc says start small and tightly scoped then scale up once you see what a task costs. And in order to do that, you would just paste in this prompt right here. Under permissions, you can set custom rules over here. You can have it automatically ask or allow without asking. So some of these I may actually want to turn off.

Uh like this one I could probably get rid of. I don't think we need that custom rule. Uh, this one right here, I think we can also turn that off. And I think a lot of these other ones we can keep turned on, but you're just going to want to make sure to look through your custom rules, allow without asking, and turn off any of those that you don't need anymore. And it also has a 10-minute setup over here as well.

I'm going to leave a link in the description below where you can get access to this to just go through and make sure that you are optimizing your credit usage on GrokBot. But again, they are saying that they're putting out fixes for improved token efficiency and smarter behavior coming real soon. This was announced just 2 days ago. So, I'm guessing they're probably going to sort out a lot of this stuff so that it's not blowing through credits super super fast.

I'm currently at about 25% and that's going to reset in the next 3 days. And hopefully some of the changes that we're going to make over here are going to optimize my credit usage even more, especially once we've created that bot that's just going to put all of the routines into it. And then I can go ahead and turn off any of them are not that are not being used or not being optimized appropriately.

You can see we've already turned off quite a few of them over here. And this should ultimately make quite a big difference moving forward. So hopefully you enjoy this video. Please go ahead subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. And as usual, go ahead and check out my landing page. All of the details are over here. If you're looking to build AI automations to save time and money for your business, you can join my Skool community starting at $29 per month for the standard plan

going up to $89 a month for the VIP plan. I provide a lot of value inside that community. You can also take a look through all of my YouTube videos and watch them directly from my website. Read through the written guides. And if you would like to sponsor a video on my channel, you can schedule a call directly on my website. See you in the next one. Signing off. Peace from Thailand.