Groq vs Mistral AI: Free Tier Comparison

Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b and Qwen3.8 27B, each at 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day, plus Whisper speech-to-text at 2,000 requests a day. Each of the three free models is also limited to 8,000 tokens a minute, and Groq applies whichever limit is reached first. Whisper is also limited to 20 requests a minute, 7,200 audio seconds an hour and 28,800 audio seconds (8 hours of audio) a day. On the free plan, gpt-oss-safeguard-20b is limited to 3 requests a minute, 1,000 requests a day, 2,000 tokens a minute and 200,000 tokens a day. Qwen3.8 27B, gpt-oss-safeguard-20b, Orpheus Arabic Saudi and Orpheus V1 English are Preview models. Groq says Preview models "are intended for evaluation purposes only and should not be used in production environments as they may be discontinued at short notice". Llama 3.3 70B and Llama 3.1 8B left the free and developer plans on 2026-08-16 and are Enterprise-only. Orpheus text-to-speech (English and Saudi Arabic) is also on the free plan, at 10 requests a minute, 100 requests and 3,600 tokens a day. Developer plan prices per 1M tokens: gpt-oss-120b $0.15/$0.60; gpt-oss-20b $0.075/$0.30; Qwen3.8 27B $0.80/$4.00. The Batch API costs 50% less and returns results within 24 hours to 7 days, without impacting standard rate limits. When requests to gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-120b or gpt-oss-safeguard-20b start with the same text as a recent request, Groq caches that part automatically and bills those input tokens 50% less. The batch discount does not stack with prompt caching discounts; all batch tokens are billed at the batch rate regardless of cache status. Orpheus text-to-speech costs $22 per 1M characters in English and $40 in Saudi Arabic. Groq's API is OpenAI-compatible at the base URL https://api.groq.com/openai/v1. The free models' API model IDs are openai/gpt-oss-120b, openai/gpt-oss-20b and qwen/qwen3.8-27b.

• Groq rate limits apply to the whole organization, not per user or API key. A request over the limit returns a 429 Too Many Requests error. Cached tokens do not count toward rate limits. (From console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits, read 2026-11-04.)
• You are billed only after you add a payment method and move to the paid Developer tier. (From console.groq.com/docs/billing-faqs, read 2026-10-05.)
• Groq does not charge at upgrade. It invoices at the end of each monthly billing cycle, and also when cumulative usage first reaches $1, $10, $100, $500, or $1,000. For India customers, the thresholds are $1, $10, and then $100 recurring. Groq bills only when usage reaches at least $0.50. Groq accepts credit cards, United States bank accounts, and SEPA debit accounts. (From console.groq.com/docs/billing-faqs, read 2026-11-04.)
• You can downgrade to Groq's Free tier at any time. You must pay a final invoice for any outstanding usage before the downgrade completes. (From console.groq.com/docs/billing-faqs, read 2026-11-04.)
• Organization owners on Groq's paid tiers can set a monthly spend limit. It applies across all API keys. At the limit, API calls return a 400 with code blocked_api_access. Current spend updates every 10-15 minutes, so you might exceed the limit slightly. Limits reset on the 1st of each month. Email alerts can be set before the limit. (From console.groq.com/docs/spend-limits, read 2026-11-04.)
• Groq's flex processing is for paid customers only. It has 10x higher rate limits than on-demand processing. Pricing matches the on-demand tier. Set the service_tier parameter to flex. If flex capacity is unavailable, requests fail with status 498 and error capacity_exceeded. (From console.groq.com/docs/flex-processing, read 2026-11-04.)
• Groq's Performance tier provides a 99.9% availability SLA and 99% latency guarantee. It is available only on enterprise plans. Billing is based on provisioned throughput, not per-token usage. Uncached context length must be under 8,192 tokens. (From console.groq.com/docs/performance-tier, read 2026-11-04.)
• Groq's Services Agreement does not permit it to train or fine-tune models on your inputs or outputs unless you give permission. (From console.groq.com/docs/legal/services-agreement, read 2026-10-05.)
• Groq's Services Agreement grants use of Groq APIs to integrate its services into customer applications for end users. Its restrictions do not prohibit commercial use. (From console.groq.com/docs/legal/services-agreement, read 2026-10-29.)
• Customers may not resell access to their Groq account. Groq's Services Agreement prohibits selling, reselling, or transferring its services except with Groq's express approval. (From console.groq.com/docs/legal/services-agreement, read 2026-10-29.)
• Groq does not retain inference requests by default. Batch input and output files are kept for 30 days unless deleted earlier. Fine-tuning data is kept until deleted. Groq may log inference inputs and outputs for up to 30 days to troubleshoot errors or investigate abuse. Zero Data Retention stops this logging and disables the Batch API and fine-tuning. (From console.groq.com/docs/your-data, read 2026-11-04.)
• Data Groq retains is stored in Google Cloud buckets in the United States. (From console.groq.com/docs/your-data, read 2026-10-05.)

Since about 2026-11-05, Mistral's Free plan covers Vibe and Studio and does not include API access. Creating API keys and calling the API require billing activation and pay-as-you-go with prepaid credits. Before then, Free mode let anyone create API keys with no credit card. The pricing page listed $10 a month of API credits on the Free plan until 2026-10-07. Mistral Pro costs $14.99 a month and includes $25.50 a month in API credits, shared across the API, Studio and Vibe Code. It included $30 a month until 2026-10-07. Verified students who have not used Vibe or Le Chat before can take the Education plan for $5.99 a month, for up to 12 months, with $15 a month in API credits. The Free plan has limited messages, web searches and coding sessions in Vibe. API prices: Ministral 3 (3B) $0.1/$0.1 (per 1M tokens); Mistral Small 4 $0.15/$0.6 (per 1M tokens); Mistral Large 3 $0.5/$1.5 (per 1M tokens); Mistral Large 4 (mistral-large-4; public preview since 2026-10-06, 1M-token context) $0.7/$2.1 (per 1M tokens); this price started on 2026-10-29; from 2026-10-20 until then, it was $1.36/$4.18; Mistral Medium 3.5 $1.5/$7.5 (per 1M tokens); Codestral $0.3/$0.9 (per 1M tokens). To call Mistral Large 4, use the model name mistral-large-4; mistral-large-latest still points to Mistral Large 3 (mistral-large-2512). Mistral Embed is $0.1 per 1M input tokens, and Codestral Embed is $0.15 per 1M input tokens. OCR 3 (mistral-ocr-2512) costs $2 per 1,000 pages and $3 per 1,000 annotated pages. OCR 4.1 (mistral-ocr-4-1) costs $4 per 1,000 pages and $5 per 1,000 annotated pages. OCR 3 remains available. Mistral Moderation 2 is free. Speech: Voxtral 3 models, released 2026-10-20: Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 (batch) costs $0.0035 per minute of audio, Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 $0.004 per minute, Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3 $0.008 per minute, and Voxtral Speech 3 (text-to-speech) $13 per 1M characters. The earlier models are still offered: Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 $0.003 per minute, Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime $0.006 per minute, and Voxtral TTS (text-to-speech) $16 per 1M characters. Mistral's voice agent API costs $0.04 per minute with Mistral Small 4 for reasoning, and $0.08 per minute with any other reasoning model. Mistral retired these models in 2026, and a request to a retired model fails with a 404 error: Mistral Large 2.1 (mistral-large-2411), Pixtral Large (pixtral-large-2411) and Devstral Medium 1.0 (devstral-medium-2507) on 2026-05-31, replaced by Mistral Medium 3.5; Devstral Small 1.1 (devstral-small-2507) on 2026-05-31, replaced by Mistral Small 4; Voxtral Mini and Voxtral Mini Transcribe (voxtral-mini-2507) on 2026-05-31, replaced by Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2; OCR 2 (mistral-ocr-2505) on 2026-05-31 and OCR 4.0 (mistral-ocr-4-0) on 2026-09-30, replaced by OCR 4.1; Mistral Moderation (mistral-moderation-2411) on 2026-06-30, replaced by Mistral Moderation 2; Mistral Small 3.2 (mistral-small-2506) and Magistral Small 1.2 (magistral-small-2509) on 2026-07-31, replaced by Mistral Small 4; Mistral Nemo 12B (open-mistral-nemo-2407) on 2026-07-31, replaced by Ministral 3 8B; Devstral 2 (devstral-2512) and Magistral Medium 1.2 (magistral-medium-2509) on 2026-07-31, and Mistral Medium 3 and 3.1 (mistral-medium-2505, mistral-medium-2508) on 2026-08-31, replaced by Mistral Medium 3.5. Mistral's table at docs.mistral.ai/models also lists the Labs models it retired. Z.ai GLM 5.2 (zai-glm-5-2) retired on 2026-10-31, replaced by GLM 5.3. Mistral deprecated Mistral Large 3 (mistral-large-2512), Mistral Medium 3.5 (mistral-medium-3-5), Voxtral TTS (voxtral-mini-tts-2603), Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 (voxtral-mini-2602) and Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime (voxtral-mini-transcribe-realtime-2602) on 2026-10-31; all five retire on 2027-04-30, replaced by Mistral Large 4 for the two text models, Voxtral TTS 3 for Voxtral TTS, Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 for Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 and Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3 for Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime. Batch processing is half price, and cached input tokens cost up to 90% less. Mistral publishes no rate-limit figures. Each organization's per-model limits (tokens per minute, requests per second) appear in Admin Panel > API > Limits. The tools of Mistral's MCP server are grouped by Studio capability: Skills, Workflows, Connectors, Observability, Evaluations, Organization and Apps.

• Since August 2026, Mistral offers Mistral AI Studio and its API only to business customers. Its consumer terms for personal use exclude both, and API use falls under the Commercial Terms for an organization, company or other entity. (From legal.mistral.ai/terms/row-consumer-terms, read 2026-10-11.)
• A business can use Mistral's API in a commercial product; individuals cannot use the API for personal projects. (From legal.mistral.ai/terms/commercial-terms-of-service, read 2026-10-11.)
• Models whose names start with "labs-" are free of charge once you have API access; Mistral calls them experimental and not for production. (From docs.mistral.ai/inference/model-lifecycle, read 2026-11-12.)
• In Free mode, Mistral may use your Studio inputs and outputs to train its models, and you can opt out at any time. (From help.mistral.ai/en/articles/347617-do-you-use-my-user-data-to-train-your-artificial-intelligence-models, read 2026-11-12.)
• The API opt-out toggle is under Anonymous improvement data, in the Privacy menu of the Admin panel, and is separate from the Vibe training toggle, so opting out of one does not opt out of the other. (From help.mistral.ai/en/articles/455207-can-i-opt-out-of-my-input-or-output-data-being-used-for-training, read 2026-10-05.)
• Mistral may train on inputs and outputs from Labs or Preview Models, which its Commercial Terms define as experimental, preview or pre-release models identified as such, including those with the "labs" prefix, even if you opted out or use zero data retention. Mistral Large 4 is a public preview. (From legal.mistral.ai/terms/commercial-terms-of-service, read 2026-10-11.)
• Le Chat is now called Vibe. "Vibe is the new name for what you knew as le Chat." Accounts and plans moved over. A Le Chat Pro subscription is now Mistral Pro. (From help.mistral.ai/en/articles/682992-le-chat-is-now-vibe, read 2026-10-21.)
• Pay-as-you-go uses prepaid credits. Your monthly usage is consumed first. API and Vibe Code requests beyond it fail with HTTP 402 if your credit balance is zero. Add credits to restore access. Auto Recharge charges your payment method when your balance falls below a set threshold. (From docs.mistral.ai/admin/billing-usage/billing, read 2026-11-04.)
• An Organization monthly spending limit caps API and Vibe spending. Each Workspace can have its own monthly spending limit, no higher than the Organization's. By default Workspaces have no cap. If the limit is reached, API access can be suspended until the next month begins or an admin increases the limit. (From docs.mistral.ai/admin/billing-usage/billing, read 2026-11-04.)
• Enabling pay-as-you-go unlocks Tier 1. Tiers upgrade automatically with the cumulative billed amount: Tier 2 over $20 billed, Tier 3 over $100, Tier 4 over $500. Over $2,000 billed, contact support. Adding credits does not raise your rate limits. Article dated August 12, 2026. (From help.mistral.ai/en/articles/698531-why-am-i-hitting-api-rate-limits-and-how-do-i-increase-them, read 2026-11-04.)
• The global endpoint api.mistral.ai has no committed inference location. Regional endpoints api.eu.mistral.ai and api.us.mistral.ai are billed at 1.1 times standard pricing. They support function calling as the only tool and do not offer Agents, Batch or the Files API. (From docs.mistral.ai/inference/regional-inference, read 2026-11-04.)
• Zero Data Retention requires pay-as-you-go and applies only to stateless API calls. Mistral reviews each request and approves or denies it. Not available for agents, conversations, libraries, batch files, or the Files API. (From help.mistral.ai/en/articles/347612-can-i-activate-zero-data-retention-zdr, read 2026-11-04.)
• Only Priority Tier has an uptime SLA of 99.5%. It requires account setup with Mistral and custom per-model limits. Standard and Batch tiers have no SLA. (From docs.mistral.ai/inference/priority-tier, read 2026-11-04.)