X, formerly Twitter, owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, has launched a new basic tier subscription for verified organisations, which is designed for small businesses. The new basic tier is priced at Rs 16,790 per month, or Rs 1,68,000 annually, this subscription is 80 per cent more affordable than the "full access" subscription, which is priced at Rs 82,300 per month. The company made the announcement via a post on X.
"Our new Verified Organizations Basic tier is now available for $200/month or $2000/year! Designed for smaller businesses, subscribers receive ad credits & priority support to enable faster growth on X Subscribe via https://x.com/i/verified-orgs-signup....," @verified posted on X.
With the new basic tier, verified organisations on X can now obtain a gold check-mark badge and several other benefits, all for $200 per month, which is a significant reduction from the $1,000 per month cost of the "full access" subscription.
Some reports suggest that X is claiming that this new tier is “designed for smaller businesses”, but the affordable plan is introduced likely because the platform has not been able to attract businesses to pay for the more expensive plan.
This comes days after Musk's xAI generative AI chatbot, Grok AI, announced expanding its availability to India and 46 other nations, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, among others. It is worth mentioning that X, previously known as Twitter, recently shared an update stating that Grok AI chatbot access is progressively reaching Premium+ subscribers in the US. The announcement for the global rollout was first shared on December 14, and now the AI tool is available to anyone who wishes to pay up to Rs 2,600 per month as access to Grok is only available for subscribers of X Premium+.
Like elsewhere globally, Grok access in India is exclusively open to X Premium+ subscribers, requiring users to pay Rs 1,300 per month or Rs 13,600 for an annual subscription, which is more than ChatGPT Plus. Grok, built on xAI's proprietary large language model (LLM) named Grok-0, boasts an impressive 33 billion parameters. According to xAI, Grok-0 surpasses the performance of OpenAI's ChatGPT based on the GPT 3.5 language model (free version).