Groq Pricing in May 2026

Groq's standard pricing follows per-token tiers across models: Llama 3.1 70B at $0.59/1M input tokens + $0.79/1M output tokens, Llama 3.3 70B Versatile at $0.59/1M input + $0.79/1M output, Mixtral 8x7B at $0.24/1M tokens. The pricing is dramatically lower than OpenAI for equivalent quality — typically 70-90% cheaper than GPT-4o for similar workloads. Real-world Groq bills for AI products land at $50-1,500/month for early-stage; high-volume products hit $5K-50K/month at scale.

The $500 startup credit covers 4-15 months of moderate Groq usage. Eligibility focuses on AI-native startups, accelerator-backed companies, and products requiring low-latency inference. The credit applies to all Groq inference services. The strategic decision: Groq's value is the latency advantage — Llama 3.3 70B at 250-300 tokens/second on Groq versus 50-100 tokens/second on Together AI/Fireworks. For latency-sensitive applications (real-time chat, voice agents, agentic loops with multiple LLM calls), Groq's speed genuinely changes the product experience. For batch workloads where latency doesn't matter, Together AI and Fireworks typically beat Groq on dedicated-instance pricing at scale. The credit window is the right time to validate whether your specific use case benefits from Groq's latency. For voice agents specifically (Vapi, Retell, Bland AI), Groq is increasingly the default LLM provider for the latency reasons. For coding agents and reasoning-heavy paths where Claude or GPT-4 quality matters more than speed, Groq is rarely the right choice.