Hey, thanks for the detailed report. I can see the screenshots from the usage page showing Grok 4.5 events and the effort level breakdown. Let me break it down.
Billing on your free Auto plan
Your answer is basically yes. Auto stays free. But when you explicitly pick Grok 4.5, that’s a named first party model, and it uses your included First party models pool. This was renamed from Auto + Composer on July 8. That’s why the usage page shows it as Included plus a per token price. This is expected.
The quick Free label you saw at the start was a launch day glitch. When Grok 4.5 launched, usage was incorrectly attributed to the API pool. This is fixed now, and usage is correctly pulled from the First party models pool. More details in this thread: Grok 4.5 pricing for subscription plans
Small bonus: included Grok 4.5 usage is currently doubled. This is 50% off, but the promo ends on July 15, so there are only a couple days left.
xhigh vs high
This is a known display mismatch in the effort level labels between the model picker app and the usage page. It’s visual only and doesn’t affect billing. Charges are applied correctly. I don’t have an ETA for a fix yet, but the issue is being tracked.
On billing page transparency, feedback noted and I’ll pass it to the team. If anything on the usage page looks off, send the Request ID right from the chat menu using Chat menu > Copy Request ID, and we can check the exact events.