Why caution:effective 2026-10-06 — Groq cut the free limits of gpt-oss-safeguard-20b from 30 to 3 requests a minute and from 8,000 to 2,000 tokens a minute; 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day are unchanged. The Internet Archive's capture of console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits on 2026-09-28 lists 30 RPM and 8K TPM, and its capture of 2026-10-06 lists 3 RPM and 2K TPM. Groq announced no change. The other free chat models keep 30 requests and 8,000 tokens a minute. Source ↗Full history ↓
A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a record effective 2026-10-06, so it lapses on 2027-04-05 unless we record something new first.
Subtypes in AI / ML:llm_api — the vendor runs language or multimodal models on its own infrastructure and sells calls to them by model name; you send a prompt and receive a completion. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://groq.com/pricing, where it says: “One fully integrated platform for infrastructure, inference, and control”How we use this.
Limits, pricing history, and 27 alternatives. Verified October 2026. Last updated 2026-10-26.
Groq's free tier offers Fast LLM inference on Groq's LPU hardware… We rate it caution — one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-10-06. Best for ai / ml workloads — 27 alternatives available.
The day we last read the vendor's page. The terms we publish were last confirmed on 2026-10-03.
Free Tier Details
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.
We read that on 2026-10-26 from https://console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits, and our check recorded: the page names Groq as "groq" and states amounts, none of which we matched to the terms we publish.
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.)
When You'll Outgrow Groq's Free Tier
At 30 requests/min, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 27 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.
Groq cut the free limits of gpt-oss-safeguard-20b from 30 to 3 requests a minute and from 8,000 to 2,000 tokens a minute; 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day are unchanged. The Internet Archive's capture of console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits on 2026-09-28 lists 30 RPM and 8K TPM, and its capture of 2026-10-06 lists 3 RPM and 2K TPM. Groq announced no change. The other free chat models keep 30 requests and 8,000 tokens a minute. Source ↗
Before: gpt-oss-safeguard-20b on the free plan: 30 requests a minute, 1,000 requests a day, 8,000 tokens a minute, 200,000 tokens a day
After: gpt-oss-safeguard-20b on the free plan: 3 requests a minute, 1,000 requests a day, 2,000 tokens a minute, 200,000 tokens a day (Free Plan Limits table)
Groq keeps running. Groq decommissioned its Compound and Compound Mini systems, model IDs groq/compound and groq/compound-mini, on September 21, 2026, after announcing it on August 24; requests to those IDs return errors. Groq named no replacement. Source ↗
Before: Groq offered its Compound and Compound Mini systems through the API under the model IDs groq/compound and groq/compound-mini.
After: "On August 24, 2026, we announced the deprecation of groq/compound and groq/compound-mini. Both systems will be decommissioned on September 21, 2026. Beginning on that date, requests to these model IDs will return errors." (console.groq.com/docs/deprecations)
Groq replaced Qwen3.6 27B (qwen/qwen3.6-27b) with its successor, Qwen3.8 27B (qwen/qwen3.8-27b), on its free and developer plans on September 14, 2026, and shut qwen/qwen3.6-27b down that day; code that calls it needs the new model ID. Source ↗
Before: Groq served Qwen3.6 27B on its free and developer plans under the model ID qwen/qwen3.6-27b.
After: "we announced the deprecation of qwen/qwen3.6-27b in favor of qwen/qwen3.8-27b. Qwen 3.8 27B is the direct successor: a 27B multimodal model with the same 131K context window, thinking and instruct modes, tunable reasoning effort, tool use, and JSON mode. This deprecation applies to free and developer-tier usage; enterprise customers with a committed-spend contract are not affected." Shutdown date 09/14/26 for qwen/qwen3.6-27b (replacement qwen/qwen3.8-27b). (console.groq.com/docs/deprecations)
Groq shut down Llama 3.1 8B and Llama 3.3 70B on its free and developer plans. On the free plan Llama 3.1 8B had allowed 14,400 requests and 500,000 tokens a day; the free chat models left (gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b and a Qwen 27B model) allow 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day each. Source ↗
Before: Free plan (console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits, Internet Archive capture of 2026-08-15): llama-3.1-8b-instant 30 RPM, 14.4K RPD, 6K TPM, 500K TPD; llama-3.3-70b-versatile 30 RPM, 1K RPD, 12K TPM, 100K TPD; gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b 30 RPM, 1K RPD, 8K TPM, 200K TPD.
After: "This deprecation applies to free and developer-tier usage; enterprise customers with a committed-spend contract are not affected." Free chat models: gpt-oss-120b, gpt-oss-20b, gpt-oss-safeguard-20b and Qwen3.8 27B, each 30 RPM, 1K RPD, 8K TPM, 200K TPD.
Groq shut down Llama 4 Scout and Qwen3 32B on its free and developer plans. Their model IDs were meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct and qwen/qwen3-32b, and Groq announced the shutdown on June 17. On the free plan Llama 4 Scout had allowed 30,000 tokens a minute and Qwen3 32B 60 requests a minute, each with 500,000 tokens a day. Groq named gpt-oss-120b as the replacement for Qwen3 32B, and gpt-oss-120b or Qwen3.6 27B for Llama 4 Scout. Source ↗
Before: Free plan (console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits, Internet Archive capture of 2026-07-13): meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct 30 RPM, 1K RPD, 30K TPM, 500K TPD; qwen/qwen3-32b 60 RPM, 1K RPD, 6K TPM, 500K TPD.
After: "This deprecation applies to free and developer-tier usage; enterprise customers with a committed-spend contract are not affected." Shutdown date 07/17/26 for qwen/qwen3-32b (replacement openai/gpt-oss-120b) and meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct (replacement openai/gpt-oss-120b or qwen/qwen3.6-27b).
How Groq compares against every one of the 27 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.
Hetzner's experimental Inference API: an OpenAI-compatible API for open-weight models, free while it stays experimental. Base URL: https://inference.hetzner.com/api/v1.
LLM inference gateway. With a free token from dash.llm7.io: 1 request a second, 60 a minute, 250 an hour and 100,000 tokens per 24 hours, counting input and output tokens; LLM7 says free quotas may be reduced without notice.
Workers AI runs AI models on Cloudflare's global network. Every account gets 10,000 Neurons per day at no charge, reset daily at 00:00 UTC; on the Workers Free plan, requests beyond that fail until the reset.
Simulate, evaluate, and observe your AI agents — The 'OSS' tier is free forever for developers, small teams, and self-managed deployments. It includes features like a drop-in replacement, OTel compatibility, metrics & traces, built-in observability, budget management, and more.
AI media gateway: one OpenAI-compatible API to image and video generation models from several providers, billed at each provider's price with no markup, platform fee or subscription. One model, FLUX.1 [schnell] FP8, is listed free per image ("Free to try", served through Fireworks AI).
Free inference endpoints on build.nvidia.com: models marked Free Endpoint, including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 Flash, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 4 31B and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra, can be called at no cost. Their model IDs are deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.1-flash, z-ai/glm-5.3-flash, openai/gpt-oss-20b,…
Keyless Classic API: one image model and GPT-OSS 20B text, free, no sign-up, rate-limited per IP. Every other model needs an API key and Pollen, and free Pollen comes only from quests.
AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month.
ML model hub. Since 2026-10-07, free accounts get no included Inference Providers credits: free users buy credits or upgrade to PRO to call Inference Providers, which serves 200+ models.
Pay-as-you-go model inference. siliconflow.cn, run by a Beijing company, lists these models at no charge: the chat models Qwen3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (Free), Qwen3.5-4B, GLM-4-9B-0414, GLM-Z1-9B-0414, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B (Free) and Xing4.0-29B; the translation model Hunyuan-MT-7B; the OCR…
China-based GLM model API. The price list marks these models free: GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4-Flash-250414 and GLM-Z1-Flash (text); GLM-4.6V-Flash, GLM-4V-Flash and GLM-4.1V-Thinking-Flash (vision); CogView-3-Flash (image); CogVideoX-Flash (video).
Inference platform for open models, with serverless per-token pricing and on-demand GPU deployments billed per GPU second. Fireworks offers $1 in free credits to get started.
Ultra-fast LLM inference API — no permanent free tier. New accounts get $5 in free credits after adding a verified payment method, expiring 30 days after they are granted.
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.
MiniMax sells API access pay-as-you-go on platform.minimax.io. Its pricing pages list no free API allowance; one docs page mentions a free quota for new pay-as-you-go users but gives no amount.
Inference API for open-source models, billed per token. Together AI does not currently offer free trials; access requires a minimum $15 credit purchase for an organization's first purchase ($5 for later purchases), and the platform is fully prepaid.
Cloud-hosted Ollama for running open-source LLMs. Between October 26 and 27, 2026, Ollama replaced its Free plan, which included starter usage credits, with a $0 Pay as you go plan.
unrated
Left out of this list: Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.
Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 27 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.
Yes, Groq offers a free tier: Free. 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...
What is Groq's free tier?
Groq's free tier is called "Free". 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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://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 https://console.groq.com/docs/your-data, read 2026-11-04.) Data Groq retains is stored in Google Cloud buckets in the United States. (From https://console.groq.com/docs/your-data, read 2026-10-05.)
Is Groq's free tier reliable?
Groq's free tier requires caution because of one specific recorded change, on 2026-10-06: Groq cut the free limits of gpt-oss-safeguard-20b from 30 to 3 requests a minute and from 8,000 to 2,000 tokens a minute; 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day are unchanged. The Internet Archive's capture of console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits on 2026-09-28 lists 30 RPM and 8K TPM, and its capture of 2026-10-06 lists 3 RPM and 2K TPM. Groq announced no change. The other free chat models keep 30 requests and 8,000 tokens a minute. Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20261006074250/https://console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits
Is Groq's free tier good for production?
Groq's free tier is usable for prototyping and development, but we rate it caution because of one recorded limit reduction, on 2026-10-06. Consider alternatives with more stable pricing for critical services.
What changed in Groq's pricing?
Groq has had 5 recorded pricing changes. Most recently: Groq cut the free limits of gpt-oss-safeguard-20b from 30 to 3 requests a minute and from 8,000 to 2,000 tokens a minute; 1,000 requests and 200,000 tokens a day are unchanged. The Internet Archive's capture of console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits on 2026-09-28 lists 30 RPM and 8K TPM, and its capture of 2026-10-06 lists 3 RPM and 2K TPM. Groq announced no change. The other free chat models keep 30 requests and 8,000 tokens a minute. Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20261006074250/https://console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits (2026-10-06).
What are the best free alternatives to Groq?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 27 free alternatives to Groq in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 12 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 6 are demoted with the reason named, 9 are listed last behind a stated gate. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
When will I outgrow Groq's free tier?
At 30 requests/min, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.
What category is Groq in?
Groq is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 27 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.