| Field | OCR.space | Groq |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota | Ongoing free tier · renewing-quota |
| What's free | 25,000 conversions/month (Engine 1 & 2) plus 1,000 Engine 3 conversions/month; max 1 MB file, PDFs up to 3 pages | Open-weight models (GPT-OSS, Qwen) plus Whisper, no credit card required |
| Rate limits | 500 requests per day per IP address | Free plan examples: openai/gpt-oss-120b, openai/gpt-oss-20b and qwen/qwen3.8-27b: 30 RPM/1K RPD/8K TPM/200K TPD; Whisper models: 20 RPM/2K RPD/7.2K audio seconds/hour and 28.8K/day; limits vary by model |
| Expires | no expiry | no expiry |
| The catch | Free searchable-PDF output carries a watermark (raw text extraction is unrestricted); the free key needs only an email, no card. Commercial use permitted. | Limits apply at the organization level, not per API key. Phone verification required at signup |
| Credit card | not required | not required |
| Phone verification | not required | required |
| Commercial use | allowed | allowed |
| OpenAI-compatible | no | yeshttps://api.groq.com/openai/v1 |
| Modalities | ocr, text | text, audio |
| Free models (sample) | no sample | openai/gpt-oss-120b openai/gpt-oss-20b qwen/qwen3.8-27b whisper-large-v3 whisper-large-v3-turbo |
| Official docs | ocr.space/OCRAPI | console.groq.com/docs/rate-limits |
| Last verified | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-08 |