GlennHasABeard estimates six Grok monitoring bots cost $30 a month

• Six read-only bots handle X account housekeeping: GlennHasABeard says Claude wrote the scripts and Grok Bot runs them on a schedule.
• API spending is projected at about $30 a month. In his cost breakdown, he reports $13.96 spent so far, roughly $12 of it on setup.
• Results land in a private, phone-friendly checklist; his first-run report says he checks names off and handles the conversations himself.

One bot unearthed an August upscaling video with 33.5 times his usual views. The six named agents can share one persistent cloud computer, with files and logins available across bots.

The $30 figure is a monthly projection for X API data on his current schedule. Setup spending included trials, test runs, a full follower scan and a backfill of 3,235 posts; normal operation is running at about $1 a day.

His scripts estimate costs before each run, and he says actual charges have consistently landed at the low end of those estimates. X’s API pricing documentation describes prepaid credits deducted as requests are made, with different rates by endpoint.

He described the assignments in his setup post, then published the schedule and estimated API charges:

• Mention Radar: Unanswered replies and quotes, with verified mutuals first. Twice daily, about $0.20 per run.
• Creator Scout: Verified AI artists near his account’s size whom he does not already follow. Every morning, about $0.45 per run.
• Warm Leads: Verified accounts that repeatedly engage but do not follow him. Mondays and Thursdays, $0 in additional API charges because it reuses Mention Radar’s data. The clever cheap bit.
• Shoutout Desk: Ten small mutuals posting AI or traditional art who have never received a shoutout from him. It keeps a history to prevent repeats. Mondays, about $0.20 per run.
• Rerun Picker: Older high-performing posts worth quoting again, with a fresh angle for each. Mondays, about $0.02 per run.
• Headcount: Follower and following scans that flag suspected fake or inactive accounts, log unfollows and track outstanding follow-backs. Manually triggered every three months, about $6.50 per scan.

Every list goes to a private page he opens on his phone. Checking a name off removes it, according to his first-day account, while his cost report puts hosting on Cloudflare’s free tier at $0.

Mention Radar initially found 136 unanswered replies and mentions from the previous three days, including 79 from verified mutuals. Warm Leads found one account that had replied seven times despite neither account following the other.

Opening a comment from the bot’s list

Catching up with comments is already easier, he says. None of the six bots posts, replies, likes or follows on his behalf.

The recycling bot uses explicit rules to keep older hits eligible as his audience grows:

1. Compare each post’s views with his typical views from the same month, rather than today’s baseline.
2. Require at least 1.5 times that month’s typical views.
3. Require the post to be at least three weeks old.
4. Exclude anything he has quote-posted within the previous 60 days.

Every Monday it returns ten picks, with Grok drafting a fresh angle for each.

The API estimate leaves out the subscription needed to run the bots. He says he upgraded to Premium, and xAI’s Grok Bot page lists Premium at $30 a month, billed monthly.

Setup and two days of operation had consumed about 19% of his weekly usage allowance. That is a separate meter from the pay-per-use X data bill.

He has already strengthened some filters and says he may share the bots, or at least their scripts, after ironing out the bugs.