GroqCloud vs Beam 1.0

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.

Beam 1.0

The Reflection API is OpenAI-compatible, with an OpenAPI document, strict structured outputs and tool calls, and error codes that say when to retry, and the weights are Apache-2.0. It is a free public beta with unpublished daily limits and no per-token price, reasoning can't be turned off, and three API incidents were posted between 14 and 16 October 2026.

GroqCloud

1. Call /models at start-up. Four model ids stopped working between July and September
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; server errors aren't billed

Beam 1.0

1. Send reasoning_effort low or medium for short tasks. The default is max, and none or minimal return 400 unsupported_value
2. Return every assistant message with its reasoning_content unchanged. If a turn comes back without it, start a new conversation, since later requests fail with missing_required_parameter
3. Don't rely on stop or seed. Both are accepted and ignored, so truncate output in your own code
4. Honour x-should-retry: false on a 429. It means a daily limit is spent and Retry-After counts to 00:00 UTC
5. Set max_completion_tokens yourself on long prompts. The default budget isn't reduced to fit the prompt and includes reasoning tokens