Groq always-free tier: $0, rate-limited

Groq’s Free plan costs $0 and gives rate-limited API access. There is no cash credit, no trial balance, and no expiring grant: the free offer is the plan itself. What the specific free-plan rate limits are is the honest gap on this page: not stated officially in a form I can quote, for reasons explained below. The official pages do not state a card requirement for the free plan. Checked against the rate-limits docs and the billing plans page on 2026-09-02.

Why there is no rate table on this page

Third-party writeups about Groq’s free tier confidently list requests per minute, requests per day, and tokens per minute for each model. Here is the problem: on Groq’s own rate-limits page, the tabbed numeric table shows Developer-plan base limits, and the docs direct you to your organization’s console settings for the limits that actually apply to you. As of 2026-08-21 I could not find an official table labeled as Free-plan limits. So I will not paste numbers whose plan attribution is unclear. The number you need is in your console after signup, per Groq’s own docs.

What is officially clear

Three things are solid. The Free plan exists at $0 with rate-limited access. Limits are organization-specific and visible in console settings. And cached tokens do not count against your token limits, a detail from the rate-limits docs that matters if your workload repeats long prompts.

Free plan versus free money

Groq belongs in the same category as the Mistral free tier: a real, usable $0 tier whose exact quotas are deliberately per-organization rather than published. That is a different offer from a dollar grant, and it fails differently: you hit a rate limit and retry later, rather than draining a balance to zero.

Choose or skip

Choose Groq’s Free plan if you want fast inference on open models at $0 and can discover your limits empirically in the console. Skip it if you need published quota guarantees before you commit; Cohere’s trial key publishes its caps, and OpenRouter’s free models publish daily request limits.

What I have done with it

Not tested yet. This page reports only what the official pages state.

Every grant I track is on the credits index.