Our take
Pick AI21 if developers who will burn the $10 / 3-month credit while they open a first File Library, then add a card and pay the live per-token row on ai21.com/pricing — the public pricing HTML 403’d the day we fetched, so we do not invent a $/1M. Pick Groq if developers who will copy a model ID and a $/1M row from the Supported Models table.
hosted inference API on GroqCloud
Best for
AI21 A file table you start at a public $
Groq Fast token generation billed per 1M tokens
Free plan
AI21 No free plan
Groq No free plan
Lowest paid
AI21 Subsequent usage $0.10
Groq Llama Prompt Guard 2 22M $0.03
Next step up
AI21
Groq Whisper large-v3-turbo $0.04/hour
Coding agent
AI21 Maestro / Agent Builder
Groq
Runs where
AI21 Hosted
Groq Hosted
Watch out
AI21 The $10 credit expires in three months
Groq Rows move
Last checked
AI21 2026-10-23 · ai21.com/pricing
Groq 2026-10-22 · console.groq.com/docs/models
developers who will burn the $10 / 3-month credit while they open a first File Library, then add a card and pay the live per-token row on ai21.com/pricing — the public pricing HTML 403’d the day we fetched, so we do not invent a $/1M.
Read the AI21 pagedevelopers who will copy a model ID and a $/1M row from the Supported Models table.
Read the Groq page