---
title: "Groq Free Tier"
slug: "groq-free-tier"
provider: "Groq"
status: "verified"
verifiedAt: "2026-10-12"
listedAt: "2026-09-12"
canonical: "https://aifree.dev/offer/groq-free-tier"
---

# Groq Free Tier

> Free rate-limited Groq API access to hosted open models, no card

- Provider: [Groq](https://aifree.dev/provider/console-groq-com)
- What is free: Free tier
- Status: verified by a person on 2026-10-12
- Credit card: not required
- Sign-up: required
- For: Developers
- Claim at: https://console.groq.com/

## What you get

Every Groq account starts on the Free plan, which gives rate-limited access to the hosted open models through an OpenAI-compatible API at no cost, with per-model limits such as 30 requests per minute and 8K tokens per minute on the GPT-OSS and Qwen models.

## The catch

Rate limits apply at the organization level and are tight (e.g. 30 RPM and 1K RPD on many models); the docs caution limits may change and exceptions exist.

## 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

## Models served free

Published free-tier rate limits; "—" = not published.

| Model | API id | Context (k tokens) | Tool calling | Vision | RPM | RPD | TPM |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| openai/gpt-oss-120b | — | 131 | — | — | 30 | 1000 | 8000 |
| openai/gpt-oss-20b | — | 131 | — | — | 30 | 1000 | 8000 |
| qwen/qwen3.8-27b | — | 131 | — | — | 30 | 1000 | 8000 |
| whisper-large-v3 | — | — | — | — | 20 | 2000 | — |
| whisper-large-v3-turbo | — | — | — | — | 20 | 2000 | — |

## Free forever by self-hosting

[Ollama](https://github.com/ollama/ollama) (MIT)

## Details

## Overview

[Groq](https://console.groq.com/) 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](https://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.

## More

- HTML page: https://aifree.dev/offer/groq-free-tier
- Change history: https://aifree.dev/offer/groq-free-tier/history
- How it was verified: https://aifree.dev/offer/groq-free-tier/verification
- More in [Free AI API credits](https://aifree.dev/free-api-credits.md)
- JSON: https://aifree.dev/api/v1/offers/groq-free-tier