A day about shared computers and shared limits. A restart that looked like data loss, a plan merge that deleted a whole setup, and two builders who found the real cost in retry loops and idle screens, not in tokens.
01
// breakage, restarts
The bot computer restarted twice and the repo looked deleted
2 restarts, about 20 minutes to sync
A user's bot computer restarted twice in one day with no notice, and files took about 20 minutes to sync back. In that gap the project folders and git repo looked deleted, the clock switched to UTC and the GitHub login was gone, so the bots stopped work and raised alarms. Nothing was lost, but they point out that a bot re-creating the repo in the empty-looking folder could have overwritten data that was still syncing. Separately, a user running 13 bots on Ultra says their bot computer broke and their small business has been halted for 24 hours with a ticket open.
A CFO who runs finance ops through Grok Bots says merging their plans deleted their Grok Bot account and their entire setup, nine bots. Their support ticket has been open since Friday. Another user says the unified subscription switch emptied the Grok Bot app, while the bots still show up in Grok. A day before the deletion, the same CFO had described their insurance: a weekly backup of every bot's rules, routines and memory as plain files outside Grok Bot.
Back up your bots' rules, routines and memory every week as plain files outside Grok Bot, and when memory and a file disagree, let the file win.
03
// costs, fix
The retry loop was the bill, not the tokens
under a cent a day for short tasks
A builder ran 3 Grok Bots for 2 days. The two short tasks stayed under a cent a day. The one that touched 6 files of type definitions forgot their conventions by round 3 and kept retrying with made-up parameter names, and that loop was the whole bill. Their fix: one goal plus one verification command per bot, and anything longer than 3 steps goes back to Claude Code.
Keep a bot's rules in the repo's AGENTS.md instead of the chat, so it never re-reads a thread to relearn them.
04
// usage limits
Bots spent a week of usage in a day, and took chat with them
35% of a week in one morning
A user on the unified Premium plan says their Grok Bots used all of the week's credits in one day, which left them without Voice or Chat until the weekly reset. They want a way to cap bots at a set share of the weekly total. A securities lawyer who moved from Cursor Ultra plus X Premium to the unified Ultra plan says normal use took 35% of the weekly allotment in one morning, and is now testing other tools as a replacement.
Idle screens ran the shared computer out of memory
closes screens idle 16+ hours
A user whose bots all share one computer says it ran low on memory, and the cause was not the disk but bot screens left open and idle for hours. One of their bots now runs a cleanup every night that closes screens idle for 16 hours or more, one at a time, and skips any screen with a browser open so logins stay put. The first run finished with nothing lost. The same post notes Grok Bot now warns once when disk runs low, names the biggest files, and deletes them only if you agree.