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Riley Brown
Grok 4.5 + Cursor is 4x Cheaper Than Opus… And Better
⏱ 15 min video · 2 min read9 Jul 2026
TL;DR
Riley Brown tests xAI's new Grok 4.5 model inside Cursor, building a personal landing page, an iOS voice chat app in Swift, and an Excalidraw clone — all in under an hour. The core finding: Grok 4.5 delivers near-Opus 4 quality at roughly 4x lower cost ($8 vs ~$30 per million tokens combined), with notably fast generation speeds.
Key points
1
Grok 4.5 costs $8 per million tokens (input+output combined) versus ~$30 for Claude Opus 4, making it roughly 3.5-4x cheaper for comparable output quality.
2
Cursor now features a 'Grok 4.5 highfast' model option and a canvas/design mode that lets you click UI elements and prompt changes visually in a full-screen browser.
3
In live demos, Grok 4.5 built a personal portfolio site (and accidentally deployed it live to Vercel), a functional iOS Swift voice chat app using the Grok Voice Agents API, and a working Excalidraw clone — all in minutes.
4
Elon Musk stated Grok 4.5's context window will expand to 1 million tokens 'probably by next week,' and xAI is training a 2 trillion parameter model coming soon.
5
Notable endorsements from Theo (t3.gg) and Dax from OpenCode confirm Grok 4.5 clears the bar for daily coding work, including browser control and knowledge tasks.
Actionable insights
→
Switch your Cursor model to 'Grok 4.5 highfast' if you are currently paying for Claude Opus 4 — you get similar output quality at ~4x lower cost per token.
→
Use Cursor's canvas/design mode with Grok 4.5 for rapid UI iteration: open the in-app browser full-screen, close the side panel, and click elements directly to prompt targeted changes.
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For iOS app prototyping, Grok 4.5 can scaffold a Swift app from documentation links and an API key prompt in under 4 minutes — useful for quick proof-of-concept voice or chat apps without leaving Cursor.
Notable quotes
“It worked for a total of three and a half minutes and it's already done.”
“I asked it to change my landing page and I was hoping it would just scrape my landing page, make a new one, and run it locally, but it turns out it actually pushed it live to my actual personal website.”
“There has never been a better time to be interested in AI agents, whether it is for coding or general knowledge work.”
Worth watching?
⏭️
Worth watching the full video?
The key findings — pricing, speed, and what Grok 4.5 can build in Cursor — are all captured here; only watch the full video if you want to see the live build demos and Cursor design mode in action.
Saved you some time? The creator still deserves a like.
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