Hard facts side by side: free tiers, prices, limits, SDKs and privacy. Every value links to the official page it came from and is re-checked every week.
| Fact |  Groq |  Mistral AI |  OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes Free tier; your exact limits show on the console Limits page. Developer tier needs a payment method. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | No, API needs pay-as-you-go Free mode gives a monthly budget to try Vibe and Studio but no API access; API needs billing activation. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Yes 25+ free models, 20 requests/min and 50/day (1,000/day after $10 in credits). Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| Starting price |
| $0.075 per 1M input tokens GPT-OSS 20B; $0.30 per 1M output tokens. GPT-OSS 120B is $0.15 in, $0.60 out. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| $0.70 per 1M input tokens Mistral Large 4; $2.10 per 1M output tokens. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| 5.5% fee on credits Standard pay-as-you-go plan; model usage billed at provider rates. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| Rate limit | 30 requests/min Developer plan base limits, openai/gpt-oss-120b; 1K requests/day, 8K tokens/min. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Not listed | 20 requests/min Free (:free) models; 50/day under $10 purchased. No plan limit on paid models. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
|---|
| Size limit | 131K token context GPT-OSS 120B (Whisper speech-to-text: 100 MB max file). Source, Nov 15, 2026 | 1M token context Mistral Large 4. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Not listed |
|---|
| Official SDKs | PythonJavaScript / TypeScriptSource, Nov 15, 2026 | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript |
|---|
| Open source | Not listed | Partly Open-weight models such as Small 4 and Ministral 3 under Apache 2.0; Large 4 under Mistral's own open-weight license. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Not listed |
|---|
| Trains on your data | Not listed | Opt-out Studio/API inputs and outputs may be used for training; customers can opt out anytime. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | No OpenRouter doesn't train on inputs/outputs; some providers may. Models that don't train are labeled. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
|---|
| EU hosting | No Retained customer data is stored in GCP buckets in the United States. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Yes Data hosted in the EU by default; US endpoint optional. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Yes EU in-region routing via eu.openrouter.ai on Business and Enterprise plans. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
|---|
| Compliance | SOC 2GDPRHIPAA Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA, with SOC 2 Type II reports for 2024 and 2025. Source, Nov 10, 2026 | SOC 2ISO 27001Source, Nov 15, 2026 | SOC 2GDPRSource, Nov 15, 2026 |
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