xAI has rolled Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium into a single plan called The X Subscription, and it’s already on sale in Japan. For Japanese users, the yen pricing has a few surprises. Some people pay more, some pay less, and one detail is worth knowing before you tap “switch.”
The five tiers, in yen
The X Subscription has five tiers: Free, Plus, Premium, Super and Ultra. TechnoEdge reported the Japanese web prices on October 13:
- Plus: ¥1,280 a month, or ¥12,800 a year. You get the blue checkmark, fewer ads, longer posts, editing, X Articles, creator tools and monetization, plus Grok and Cursor.
- Premium: ¥5,280 a month, or ¥52,800 a year. Ads are gone almost everywhere, you get Grok Bot, and AI usage is four times the Plus level.
- Super: ¥17,800 a month, or ¥178,000 a year. That’s 15 times Plus usage, with priority access when things get busy.
- Ultra: ¥34,800 a month, or ¥348,000 a year. That’s 50 times Plus usage, with early access to new products and models.
Annual plans cost the same as 10 months. Buying inside the iPhone app is pricier: Plus is ¥1,580 a month, Super ¥19,800 and Ultra ¥40,800. If you’re not in a hurry, sign up on the web.
Who pays more, and who pays less
This is where the yen gets interesting. In the U.S., Plus costs $8 a month, the same as the old X Premium. In Japan, the old Premium was ¥980, so Plus at ¥1,280 is a ¥300 (about 31%) increase. That comes from how the yen price was set, not from any new US price.
Heavier users come out ahead. The old Premium+ cost ¥6,080 a month. The new Premium tier, which includes everything Premium+ had, costs ¥5,280, which is ¥800 (about 13%) cheaper. xAI says Premium bundles SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+, which previously cost $90 a month combined.
What the AI actually includes
The biggest change is that X’s features and AI usage now come together. Even Plus includes Grok chat, voice, Imagine image generation, Build, the Grok API and Cursor’s coding tools. All of them draw from one weekly allowance that’s shared across the Grok app, the Grok tab on X and Cursor.
Premium and above add Grok Bot, the AI agent, plus Cursor Pro features such as cloud agents, Bugbot code review and Origin code hosting. Using third-party models like Claude or GPT inside Cursor doesn’t come out of the shared allowance. Those are billed separately at API list prices.
Read this before you switch
Existing X Premium plans don’t change automatically. Your price, features and any annual term continue as they are. xAI says it plans to move legacy subscribers to the new plans eventually, with notice, but hasn’t set a date.
TechnoEdge flags the important catch: in Japan, switching can’t be undone, and support can’t reverse it either. The old plans are closed to new sign-ups, so once you leave, you can’t go back to the old price. The benefits also apply only to personal accounts, not accounts managed by an organization.
The practical advice:
- If you only use X and pay ¥980 for Premium, staying put saves you ¥300 a month.
- If you use Grok or Cursor, Plus gives you a lot more AI for that ¥300.
- If you’re on Premium+, switching to Premium is simply cheaper.
Look for limited-time offers on the checkout screen, such as 25% off Plus for six months and 50% off the first month of Premium and above.
The EVX News take
Bundling social, chat, agents and coding into one plan is classic Musk: put everything in one place and price it so the heavy users win. For Japan, one of X’s most loyal markets, the ¥300 increase on the entry tier will grab headlines. The more meaningful change is that a ¥1,280 checkmark now comes with a real AI toolkit attached. For anyone building things, that’s a better deal than it looks.
Sources: xAI, TechnoEdge via Yahoo! Japan News (Japanese), Terraise (Japanese).
— The EVX News team
Featured image: Grok AI (xAI) logo, via Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.
