Groq vs Mistral AI: Free Tier Comparison

Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware. Free plan: gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b 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. Llama 3.3 70B and Llama 3.1 8B left the free and developer plans on 2026-08-16 and are Enterprise-only. Developer plan prices per 1M tokens: gpt-oss-120b $0.15/$0.60; gpt-oss-20b $0.075/$0.30.

• Rate limits apply to the whole organization, not to each user or API key. A request over a limit gets a 429 Too Many Requests error. (From console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits, read 2026-10-05.)
• 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'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 does not keep inference requests by default. It may log inputs and outputs for up to 30 days to troubleshoot or investigate abuse; enabling Zero Data Retention in Data Controls stops this. (From console.groq.com/docs/your-data, read 2026-10-05.)
• Data Groq retains is stored in Google Cloud buckets in the United States. (From console.groq.com/docs/your-data, read 2026-10-05.)

Mistral's Free plan includes monthly usage shared across Studio, the API and Vibe Code. The pricing page no longer states the amount as of 2026-10-07; it previously listed $10 a month in API credits. When it is used up, usage can stop until the next month unless pay-as-you-go is turned on. API keys work with no credit card, within rate limits. The plan also 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 (public preview since 2026-10-06, 1M-token context) $1.36/$4.18 (per 1M tokens), and Mistral charges half that for its first two weeks; Mistral Medium 3.5 $1.5/$7.5 (per 1M tokens); Codestral $0.3/$0.9 (per 1M tokens). Mistral Embed is $0.1 per 1M input tokens, and Codestral Embed is $0.15 per 1M input tokens. OCR 4.1 costs $4 per 1,000 pages. Mistral Moderation 2 is free. Mistral retired Devstral 2 (devstral-2512) on 2026-07-31 and names Mistral Medium 3.5 as its replacement. 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.

• On the Free plan, Mistral may use your Studio and API 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 2026-10-05.)
• 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 (models with the "labs" prefix in Studio) even if you opted out or use zero data retention. (From legal.mistral.ai/terms/commercial-terms-of-service, read 2026-10-05.)