Grok 4.1 Fast
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 8 of 10 LLM APIs by recommenders
Cheap xAI language model API that people find capable for research and everyday tasks. Caveat: requests were silently rerouted to Grok 4.3 at higher prices.
Cheap xAI language model API that people find capable for research and everyday tasks. Caveat: requests were silently rerouted to Grok 4.3 at higher prices.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 74%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Low price for its capability
“grok 4.1 fast is around 10x cheaper but performs slightly better”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Anthropic: AI Coding shows no productivity gains; impairs skill development” “Grok 4.1 Fast is really good and only $0.20.”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies” “it was a really capable model for the money”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX” Strong for research tasks
“Grok 4.1 Fast is the cheapest way to do research on X”
Comment from 6 May 2026 in “Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX” “for researching stuff it is incredible”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “GPT-5.4” Consistently good on real tasks
“one of the top models for a long time, especially in real world usage”
Comment from 26 Feb 2026 in “How Will OpenAI Compete?” “It is consistently good at this task though!”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Opus 4.7”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Requests silently rerouted, price rising
“they silently rerouted it to 4.3 and just started charging more”
Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “A Robot Is Sprinting Towards You: Do You Want It Running on Claude or Grok?” “Requests to grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning now silently route to grok-4.3”
Comment from 8 Jun 2026 in “DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision” Poor results in some tests
“the results are mild to put it kindly”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Kimi Claw” “Grok-4.1-Fast falls to bits”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “How to Code Claude Code in 200 Lines of Code”
Other LLM APIs people recommend
The four most recommended other LLM APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral | 314 | 245 | 56% | 13 | 6 mo9 owners | — |
| DeepSeek API | 171 | 56 | 75% | 11 | 1 mo9 owners | Approved |
| OpenAI API | 166 | 286 | 37% | 13 | 9 mo7 owners | — |
| Anthropic API | 58 | 126 | 32% | 12 | — | — |
| Grok 4.1 FastThis page | 14 | 5 | 74% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
18 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“The first one is the one that wins a battle royale.”
“they silently rerouted it to 4.3 and just started charging more”
“Requests to grok-4-1-fast-non-reasoning now silently route to grok-4.3”
“it was a really capable model for the money”
“Grok 4.1 Fast is the cheapest way to do research on X”
“can usually find via static analysis a few things that other models dont seem to catch”
“It is consistently good at this task though!”
“Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning is/was a solid model.”
“for researching stuff it is incredible”
“one of the top models for a long time, especially in real world usage”
“the results are mild to put it kindly”
“Both of these choke less than Anthropic's own Sonnet”
“grok 4.1 fast is around 10x cheaper but performs slightly better”
“Grok 4.1 Fast is really good and only $0.20.”
“10x larger context window (2M tokens instead of ~128-200k of gpt-4-1-nano)”
“Grok-4.1-Fast falls to bits”
“Guess which ones got 100% accuracy? GPT-5-mini, Grok-4.1-fast and... Llama4 Scout.”
“Smaller models are getting good enough for real tasks”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.