SpaceXAI Team Bots: Shared Memory, Separate Billing

James Turner

Last time we dug into a nasty surprise. A bot triggers a Cursor cloud agent, and somebody's quota quietly drains. The advice was one bot, one job, one machine, plus hard spending caps. This week there's a real payoff to that story. SpaceXAI announced Team Bots on September 28, and the headline is who pays. Quick note first: this episode is brought to you by Jellypod AI, the easiest platform to create AI podcasts and generative videos.

James Turner

A word on sources. The community changelog at getgrokbot.com tracks releases through August 31, and a Cursor support engineer said on the forum that there's no official changelog right now. The best place to check is the Grok Bot account on X. So for this week, I'm leaning on SpaceXAI's Team Bots announcement and its docs, which were updated September 29. Per our research, Team Bots is in public beta on Cursor Teams and Enterprise plans.

James Turner

Here's the problem it solves. Until now, sharing a bot meant a template link. Someone opens it, adds a copy, and that copy belongs to them. The docs are clear that it doesn't hand over your computer, your logins, or your conversation history. That's safe, but the copies drift apart. Different memories, different tools, no single bot your team can point to as the real one.

James Turner

A Team Bot flips that. It's one Bot your whole team talks to. The owner sets it up once, with the plugins, secrets, skills, and files it needs, then publishes it to the team. Teammates chat with it in the Grok Bot app or in Slack, and when the owner changes something, the change reaches everyone.

James Turner

Now the privacy model, because it's easy to get wrong. Every teammate gets their own chat. The owner can't read teammates' chats, and teammates can't read the owner's. But the Bot keeps two kinds of memory. It holds private notes with each person, and it holds a shared team memory that every conversation reads. Per the research, the Bot saves something to team memory when someone tells it the whole team should know it. So if you want the Bot to remember something for everybody, say so out loud.

James Turner

And now the part that answers last episode. The docs say that when a teammate chats with a Team Bot, the usage counts against that teammate's own Grok Bot allowance, not the owner's. That holds in the desktop app, the mobile app, and Slack. According to the research brief, scheduled routines bill to whoever created the routine. If a teammate runs out of weekly usage, the Bot tells them in the chat or the Slack thread instead of quietly tapping the owner. The one exception: messages that can't be attributed to a person, like an automated Slack workflow trigger, fall back to the owner's pool.

James Turner

So what changes for you? If you were afraid to share a bot because every question would hit your quota, that fear has a concrete answer now. It's not a replacement for spending caps on automated triggers, since those unattributed messages still land on the owner. But for people asking questions, the cost follows the person asking.

James Turner

Next, Slack. A published Team Bot can have its own Slack app, with its own name and avatar, so it posts as itself instead of as a generic app. It answers direct messages, responds when you mention it in a channel, and follows threaded replies without needing a fresh mention each time. One requirement: teammates link their Slack account to Cursor under Settings, General, Team Bots. Unlinked users get a Link Account prompt, which is what keeps outsiders from spending your company's compute.

James Turner

Where does the work actually run? Per the brief, it depends on the context. The owner's chat in the app runs on the owner's cloud computer. A teammate's app chat, or their one on one Slack DM, runs on that teammate's computer. Shared Slack channels, group DMs, and threads run on a dedicated cloud computer for that Team Bot, separate from everyone's personal ones. So a file you drop in your private chat stays on your machine, and a file shared in a channel lives on the Bot's channel computer. Remember that earlier docs warned not to use separate Bots as a security boundary on your personal computer. Team Bots draw a different line.

James Turner

Secrets are handled centrally too. A Team Bot supports up to 25 encrypted secrets, referenced by variable name, and values show up as REDACTED in terminal output, logs, and plugin responses. Teammates can't see them. If your Bot builds a custom MCP server, a Cursor support reply on October 1 says hosting it at a URL is the most reliable way to share it, because a local command depends on files that only exist on the creator's computer. And if the Bot needs a teammate's personal connector, like Linear or Google Drive, it posts a card asking: allow once, always allow for this Bot, always allow for all Team Bots, or skip.

James Turner

SpaceXAI shared a few examples. Harper, a small business insurance company, built a customer recovery Team Bot in 24 hours to reconcile lapsed policies across three internal platforms and draft outreach. Their CEO, Dakotah Rice, reported it recovered over $120,000 for hundreds of policyholders. Inside SpaceXAI, an engineering bot in Slack connected to Notion, Linear, Datadog, and Cursor helped a five person team coordinate hundreds of Cursor Cloud Agents, with over 100 verified pull requests a day during the launch push. Those are company reported numbers, not independent ones.

James Turner

One model note. Grok 4.7 hit the API on September 21, with a 500k context window and reasoning effort from low to xhigh. A faster variant is available only in Cursor and Grok Build, at 2x the standard token rates, billed through your plan. But the Grok Bot docs say Cursor manages model selection and there's no model picker, so I can't tell you which model is behind your Bot today. The last confirmed model change in the changelog is Grok 4.6, on August 12.

James Turner

If you want to use this, pick one shared job. Metrics questions, triage in a Slack channel, or an internal helpdesk. Set it up once, put secrets in the encrypted list, host custom tools at a URL, and tell it what the whole team should remember. Keep a personal Bot for your everyday work, and keep approvals on anything that sends or deletes.