Groq Free Tier
Free rate-limited Groq API access to hosted open models, no card
What you get from Groq Free Tier for free
Overview
Groq runs open-weight models on its LPU inference hardware and serves them through an OpenAI-compatible API. New accounts begin on the Free plan, which provides rate-limited access to the hosted models without a paid subscription.
Free Tier Quotas & Limits
Published free/base per-model limits include:
| Model ID | RPM | RPD | TPM | TPD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| openai/gpt-oss-120b | 30 | 1K | 8K | 200K |
| openai/gpt-oss-20b | 30 | 1K | 8K | 200K |
| openai/gpt-oss-safeguard-20b | 3 | 1K | 2K | 200K |
| qwen/qwen3.8-27b | 30 | 1K | 8K | 200K |
| meta-llama/llama-prompt-guard-2-22m | 30 | 14.4K | 15K | 500K |
| whisper-large-v3 | 20 | 2K | — | — |
| whisper-large-v3-turbo | 20 | 2K | — | — |
Limits apply at the organization level rather than per user, cached tokens do not count toward them, and exceeding any metric returns HTTP 429. Exact current limits for an account are shown on its limits page.
Key Free Models
The free catalog covers text generation and reasoning (openai/gpt-oss-120b, openai/gpt-oss-20b, qwen/qwen3.8-27b), content moderation (meta-llama/llama-prompt-guard-2-22m) and speech-to-text (whisper-large-v3, whisper-large-v3-turbo).
How to Get Started
Sign up at console.groq.com, create a key on the API Keys page, and call https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/chat/completions. The endpoint works with the official OpenAI SDKs by changing the base URL and key, and Groq also publishes its own Python SDK. Higher limits are available by upgrading to the Developer plan.
Before you claim
- Payment card: Not needed.
- Account: Sign up with the provider.
Key limits
- Per-organization limits tracked as RPM, RPD, TPM, TPD
- openai/gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b: 30 RPM / 1K RPD / 8K TPM / 200K TPD
- qwen/qwen3.8-27b: 30 RPM / 1K RPD / 8K TPM / 200K TPD
- whisper-large-v3 and turbo: 20 RPM / 2K RPD, 7.2K audio sec/hour, 28.8K audio sec/day
- Cached tokens do not count against limits; exceeding limits returns 429
Ollama (MIT) runs on your own machine with no quota.
Runs the same open-weight models (gpt-oss, Qwen) locally, slower than Groq's hardware.
Models served free
Limits as the provider publishes them; a dash means none is published.
| Model | Context | RPM | RPD | TPM | Tools | Vision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| openai/gpt-oss-120bFree Plan Limits tab; TPD 200K | 131k | 30 | 1,000 | 8,000 | — | — |
| openai/gpt-oss-20bFree Plan Limits; TPD 200K | 131k | 30 | 1,000 | 8,000 | — | — |
| qwen/qwen3.8-27bFree Plan Limits; TPD 200K | 131k | 30 | 1,000 | 8,000 | — | — |
| whisper-large-v3Audio limits are in seconds per hour and per day, not tokens | — | 20 | 2,000 | — | — | — |
| whisper-large-v3-turboAudio limits in seconds, not tokens | — | 20 | 2,000 | — | — | — |
Will this fit my app? Check it in the rate-limit calculator with openai/gpt-oss-120b · openai/gpt-oss-20b · qwen/qwen3.8-27b (prefilled with the model’s published daily cap at ~800 tokens per request).
History
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Full history with screenshots · How we verified this offer · Sitewide changelog
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Understand it
A few minutes of play-along, no sign-up.
- Why does the answer appear word by word? · Streaming, time to first token and tokens per second · 5 min
- Why can I run Llama on my laptop but not GPT? · Open weights vs closed API models, and model licenses · 5 min
Appears in
More free API credits
Related offers
Free models: DeepSeek-V4-Flash, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, MiniCPM5-2B
100,000 tokens/day - Basic and free models only; premium models require a paid plan
500,000 tokens/month - 80 requests/minute and 100,000 tokens/minute on the free plan
30M tokens/month on the free tier (input + output, incl. reasoning)
$200 credit valid for 30 days only
15,000,000 Free.ai tokens granted per accepted startup