Groq: "Developer tier upgrades are temporarily unavailable"

Groq's pricing page currently shows: "Developer tier upgrades are temporarily unavailable due to high demand." If you have outgrown the free tier and cannot pay to raise your limits, you are not doing anything wrong — the self-serve upgrade path is closed. Here are the practical options.

Last verified September 16, 2026 against Groq pricing, Groq rate limits · 5 min read

Provider	Groq
Where you see it	Console → Billing → Plans
Message	Developer tier upgrades are temporarily unavailable due to high demand.
When it happens	You try to move from the Free plan to the Developer plan to raise rate limits
Can you wait it out?	Only if you can accept free-tier limits until Groq reopens upgrades (no date given)

Why this happens

Groq gates higher rate limits behind its paid Developer tier. When that upgrade is paused, free-tier accounts have no way to increase RPM / RPD / TPM / TPD from the dashboard. Enterprise (committed-spend) contracts are unaffected, but those require contacting sales and are not a fit for an individual developer or a small project.

What actually raises your limits today

Wait for the tier to reopen. Free, but unpredictable — and your app is capped or down in the meantime.
Contact Groq sales for Enterprise. Real, but heavyweight; not sized for small usage.
Run the same model on an ungated endpoint. The open models Groq serves (Llama 3.3 70B, GPT-OSS 120B, and others) are available from other OpenAI-compatible providers with pay-as-you-go billing and no tier to unlock.

The drop-in path

Since Groq is OpenAI-compatible, switching is a base-URL change. Your model id, request body and SDK stay the same:

Example

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.inferenceapis.com/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["INFERENCEAPIS_KEY"],
)
# keep model="llama-3.3-70b-versatile" or switch to a current model

Pay-as-you-go means there is no daily request or token ceiling to hit and no upgrade to be approved for — you pay per request for what you use.

Where Inference APIs fits

When the upgrade path is closed, the self-serve alternative is any OpenAI-compatible provider that bills per request. Inference APIs is one; it accepts Groq-style model ids so the switch is a base-URL change.

Create a free account API docs How a base-URL switch works

Something changed or wrong? Tell us and we will re-verify the entry.