GroqCloud vs SiliconFlow

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.

SiliconFlow

Per-token prices for every listed model are public, and one key reaches chat, embeddings, reranking, image, video and speech through OpenAI-style and Anthropic-style routes. No status page, SLA, security page or official SDK was found, release notes stop at 11 June 2026, and several model removals are dated the same day as their notice.

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

SiliconFlow

1. Set the OpenAI client's base URL to https://api.siliconflow.com/v1, or the Anthropic client's to https://api.siliconflow.com/, and send the key as a Bearer token
2. Take model ids from the model pages or GET /v1/models, not from the OpenAPI enum or the function calling guide, which list removed models
3. Check the model field of each response. On 11 June 2026 traffic for GLM-5 and Kimi-K2.5 was routed to successor models
4. Use response_format of json_object only where the model page says JSON Mode is supported, and keep max_tokens about 10,000 below the context length
5. Set the Claude Code environment variables by hand. The automated route pipes a script from an Amazon S3 bucket into bash