Even worse, the mere risk of quota exhaustion mid-conversation makes me not risk starting convos with Grok, instead I'll use ChatGPT or Claude (even though Claude is inferior for non-coding tasks, and ChatGPT is inferior for all tasks).
In fairness to xAI, they're a profit-motivated company like any other, so they cannot give us tokens for free or less than it costs them. Reality is we may have to simply pay a lot more if we want that Grok goodness.
Claude voice mode if you put it on Opus is now also pretty good, but there are frequently situations where I get upset at it’s responses.