GroqCloud vs Prism Inference

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.

Prism Inference

Three wire formats, a public OpenAPI 3.1 file, per-token prices in a keyless catalogue and zero data retention by default on every tier. The service launched on 24 September 2026 with two models, one of them by request, from a two-person company. No rate-limit numbers, SLA document, free tier or deprecation policy was found.

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

Prism Inference

1. Call GET https://api.prisminference.com/v1/models at start-up, with no key, and use only ids it returns. Expect 403 on gemma-4-31b without organisation access
2. Use base URL https://api.prisminference.com/v1 for OpenAI clients and https://api.prisminference.com with no /v1 for Anthropic clients
3. Read error.retryable before retrying, and wait for Retry-After on 429, which covers both key limits and model capacity
4. Send reasoning_effort: "none" or low when latency matters. Reasoning is on by default and its tokens are billed as output
5. Keep conversation state yourself and send store: false on Responses. previous_response_id, stored responses and hosted tools aren't supported