Groq vs Fastly
Fastest LLM inference — LPU-powered (300-1000+ tokens/sec)
vs. Edge cloud platform — CDN + compute + security + observability
Pricing tiers
Groq
Free Tier
Generous free RPM / TPM by model. Great for dev + small apps.
Free
On-Demand (paid)
Pay-as-you-go per token. OpenAI-compatible API, no infrastructure to manage.
$0 base (usage-based)
Developer Tier
Higher rate limits for production apps.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated capacity, SLA, on-prem option.
Custom
Fastly
Free Trial
Free allowances: 100 GB bandwidth, 1M CDN requests, 10M Edge Compute requests, 100M vCPU-ms, 500K DDoS requests.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Usage-based rates with volume discounts. No minimum commitment.
$0 base (usage-based)
Basic Package
$1,500/month. 100M requests. Standard support.
$1500/mo
Starter Package
$6,000/month. 500M requests. Gold support.
$6000/mo
Advantage
Custom. 2B requests. Gold support.
Custom
Ultimate
Custom. 5B+ requests. Enterprise support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free-tier on Groq vs free on Fastly.
| Metric | Groq | Fastly |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Groq · 7 features
- Audio Transcription — Whisper endpoint.
- Batch API — 50% discount.
- Chat Completions (OpenAI-compat) — Standard /v1/chat/completions endpoint.
- Function Calling
- JSON Mode — Enforce JSON output format.
- Prompt Caching — 50% discount on cached input.
- Streaming — SSE streaming for chat.
Fastly · 16 features
- API Security — Schema validation + rate limiting.
- Bot Management — Behavioral bot detection + mitigation.
- CDN — Global Varnish-based CDN with VCL customization.
- Compute@Edge — Wasm-based serverless at 200+ POPs. Rust, JS, Go.
- DDoS Protection — Included on all plans.
- Fanout (WebSockets) — Persistent connection fan-out at edge.
- Image Optimization — On-the-fly resize/format/quality.
- Instant Purge — <150ms global cache invalidation.
- KV Store (Config) — Edge key-value store for config.
- Live Streaming — HLS + DASH live video delivery.
- Log Streaming — Real-time logs to S3, Datadog, Splunk, Azure, GCS, Kafka.
- Managed TLS — Automated cert issuance + renewal.
- Next-Gen WAF — Signal Sciences acquired — runtime app protection.
- Real-Time Analytics — Sub-second log streaming + metrics.
- Secret Store — Encrypted secrets at edge.
- Shield POP — Origin shield to reduce origin load.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Groq | Fastly |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Fastly CLI |
| SDK | groq-python, groq-sdk (Node) | compute-go-starter, compute-js-starter, compute-rust-starter |
| REST | Groq API (OpenAI-compat) | Fastly API |
| OTHER | — | Compute@Edge (Wasm), VCL (Varnish) |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Groq and Fastly are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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