GroqCloud vs Novita AI

GroqCloud

Free plan with no card, at 30 requests a minute and 1,000 a day on gpt-oss. Four model shutdown dates between 2026-07-17 and 2026-09-21, with no stated minimum notice.

Novita AI

Per-token prices for about 140 language models are public, and each key can carry an expiry, a model allowlist and a source IP allowlist. No status page, SLA or security.txt was found, the per-model rate limit figures are drawn by script, and both vendor SDK repositories are archived while the docs still point to them.

GroqCloud

1. Call /models at start-up. Four model ids stopped working this quarter
2. Read retry-after on a 429 and the x-ratelimit-remaining-tokens header before the next call
3. Free plan allows 8,000 tokens a minute on gpt-oss, so keep prompts small or batch them
4. Don't build on Qwen 3.8 27B. It's a preview and previews can go at short notice
5. Treat a 498 as Flex capacity and retry later; 5xx responses aren't billed

Novita AI

1. Set the OpenAI client base URL to https://api.novita.ai/openai and send the key as Authorization: Bearer. Keys start with sk_
2. Do not close a connection to stop generation. A request that reached the model is billed in full under status 499, so cap output with max_tokens
3. On 429, check whether the code is RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED or TOKEN_LIMIT_EXCEEDED and back off exponentially. No Retry-After header is documented
4. Read the changelog for retirement notices before pinning a model id. One retirement in October 2026 came with 11 days' notice
5. Ask the account owner for a key with an expiry, a model access policy and an IP allowlist. Keys are created and deleted only in the console