Complete pricing for Groq Cloud's LPU-accelerated LLaMA and Mixtral inference — plus head-to-head comparisons with Claude, GPT-4o, and Mistral.
Groq bills input and output tokens separately, in millions of tokens (MTok).
| Model | Input (MTok) | Output (MTok) | Context | Speed (tok/s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLaMA 3.1 8B | $0.05 | $0.08 | 128K | ~800 |
| LLaMA 3.2 11B Vision | $0.18 | $0.18 | 128K | ~600 |
| LLaMA 3.1 70B | $0.59 | $0.79 | 128K | ~330 |
| LLaMA 3.3 70B | $0.59 | $0.99 | 128K | ~300 |
| Mixtral 8x7B | $0.24 | $0.24 | 32K | ~480 |
| Gemma 2 9B | $0.20 | $0.20 | 8K | ~500 |
| LLaMA 3.1 405B | $2.99 | $2.99 | 128K | ~100 |
Full market comparison across the entire LLM pricing spectrum.
| Model | Provider | Input (MTok) | Output (MTok) | Model Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLaMA 3.1 8B | Groq | $0.05 | $0.08 | Open-weight |
| GPT-4o-mini | OpenAI | $0.15 | $0.60 | Frontier (small) |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Anthropic | $0.25 | $1.25 | Frontier (small) |
| LLaMA 3.1 70B | Groq | $0.59 | $0.79 | Open-weight |
| Mistral Large | Mistral | $2.00 | $6.00 | Frontier (mid) |
| GPT-4o | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | Frontier |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | Frontier |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | $15.00 | $75.00 | Frontier (max) |
LLaMA 3.1 8B on Groq generates 10× faster than typical GPU-based providers, enabling real-time voice and streaming use cases.
Groq's LPU architecture delivers near-instant time-to-first-token — critical for user-facing streaming chat interfaces.
LLaMA 8B at $0.05/MTok is among the cheapest available inference for non-trivial models. 100M tokens costs just $5.
Groq's free tier is one of the most generous in the industry — 14,400 requests/day across all models. No credit card needed.
| Use Case | Best Choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time voice / audio transcription | Groq | Groq Whisper at $0.111/hr, ultra-low latency |
| Streaming chatbot (cost-sensitive) | Groq (LLaMA 70B) | 5× cheaper, 5× faster than Claude Sonnet |
| Complex reasoning / coding agent | Claude Sonnet/Opus | Frontier model quality matters here |
| Bulk classification / labeling | Groq (LLaMA 8B) | $0.05/MTok, high throughput |
| Multi-step agentic pipeline | Claude Sonnet | Better tool use, instruction following |
| RAG over short documents | Groq (Mixtral 8x7B) | 32K context, fast, cheap |
| Legal / medical analysis | Claude Opus | Accuracy stakes too high for open-weight |
| Prototyping / development | Groq (free tier) | 14,400 req/day free, no credit card |
| Model | Input Cost (500M tok) | Output Cost (500M tok) | Total/Month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Groq LLaMA 3.1 8B | $25 | $40 | $65 |
| Groq Mixtral 8x7B | $120 | $120 | $240 |
| Groq LLaMA 3.1 70B | $295 | $395 | $690 |
| Claude Haiku (cached) | $12.50 cached | $625 | ~$638 |
| Claude Sonnet (standard) | $1,500 | $7,500 | $9,000 |
| GPT-4o | $1,250 | $5,000 | $6,250 |
No. Groq (groq.com) is an AI infrastructure company that builds custom LPU chips for fast LLM inference. Grok (x.ai) is a large language model developed by Elon Musk's xAI. They are completely different companies. Groq serves LLaMA/Mixtral/Gemma models. xAI's Grok model is available via the X (Twitter) API separately.
Yes. LLaMA 3.1 70B, LLaMA 3.3 70B, and Mixtral 8x7B on Groq support function calling (tool use). The implementation follows the OpenAI function calling schema, making it easy to switch from OpenAI to Groq with minimal code changes. Quality and reliability of function calling is generally lower than Claude's tool use.
Free tier: 30 RPM, 14,400 requests/day per model. Paid tier rate limits scale with usage spend. Groq's free tier is among the most generous of any LLM provider — ideal for prototyping and low-volume production. For enterprise volume (>1M requests/day), contact Groq for dedicated capacity.