Grok is about to cross 100 million downloads on the App Store and Google Play, roughly a year after its official launch. That puts it in a club with just ChatGPT and Gemini.
But downloads aren't what makes Grok's story interesting. The money is.
According to Appfigures Intelligence, Grok has earned about $79M in net revenue in its first 12 months of monetization. ChatGPT earned about $80M in net revenue in its first 12 months on mobile, which is essentially the same.
No other AI chatbot is even in the same ballpark.
What makes this impressive is the context. ChatGPT launched into an empty market. It was the first AI chatbot most people had ever used, and it had no real competition for months. Grok launched into a crowded field with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and DeepSeek all fighting for the same users. And it still nearly matched ChatGPT's first-year revenue.
Grok's trajectory is also steeper. Our estimates show that this January was Grok's biggest month ever at $17M in net revenue. ChatGPT didn't hit that level until its 13th month.
Last month I wrote about how X's revenue doubled when it split Grok into its own app. That article focused on what the split meant for X. But I didn't zoom in on Grok itself. Now that I have, the numbers tell a clear story.
Grok's iOS app soft-launched at the end of December 2024, initially limited to a handful of countries. The Android app followed in early February 2025, and that's when things got real. xAI opened the app to the world and started monetizing with in-app subscriptions.
The first few months were modest, but by April downloads surged as xAI made Grok free on X, turning every X user into a potential Grok user overnight. Downloads cooled a little over the summer, but revenue kept climbing. By the fall, both were accelerating, and January set records on both fronts.
Most of Grok's downloads come from Android, with India and the US leading by a wide margin. But flip to revenue, and the story reverses completely. Our estimates show iPhones generate more than 3x the net revenue of Android. And the US alone accounts for more than half of Grok's total haul, while India, despite nearly matching the US on downloads, has contributed just 2%. Let that sink in.
To put things in perspective, I compared the 12 months of net revenue for the top AI chatbots:
ChatGPT is in a league of its own overall with nearly a billion downloads and an estimated $2.6B in net revenue. But rewind to its first year, and it earned about $80M. Grok is right there.
Gemini is the odd one out. Hundreds of millions of downloads but barely any revenue. That's by design. Google is pushing it aggressively through Android and doesn't use in-app purchases on Google Play, so we can't estimate that side. Google is clearly prioritizing distribution over monetization, showing just how competitive this race is.
Grok is the only AI chatbot to come within striking distance of ChatGPT's first-year pace.
Claude has the fewest downloads of the bunch at 22M, but has earned $59M after fees. That's $2.69 per download, the highest of any AI chatbot on this list, including ChatGPT. For comparison, Grok's is $0.89. Anthropic's users are paying.
Perplexity has 85M downloads and $44M in net revenue. For an app that's purely a subscription product with no built-in distribution advantage, that's a strong conversion rate.
Meta AI and DeepSeek get millions of downloads but don't monetize (yet?).
The real question is whether Grok can keep tracking ChatGPT's curve. January was a strong month for AI apps across the board, so I'm going to wait to see February and March before calling it a trend.
But what I can say right now is this: Grok launched into a market ChatGPT had mostly for itself, went up against a half-dozen competitors, including the massive launch of DeepSeek just weeks prior, and nearly matched ChatGPT's first-year revenue anyway. Gemini, with all of Google's distribution power, earned a fraction of that in the same timeframe.
Though that changed thanks to nano 🍌, so I'm watching that too.
The next frontier is agents. Let's see where Grok will fit in that race.
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