What Groq actually is
Groq (not to be confused with xAI's "Grok" model — the names are easy to mix up) is a company that runs open-weight AI models — like Llama and others — on their own custom chips built for very fast inference. For end users, the practical upshot is a free API tier that responds quickly and doesn't require a credit card to start.
Step 1: create an account
Go to console.groq.com/keys and sign in with an email address or a Google account. No payment details are required for the free tier.
Step 2: generate an API key
- Click "Create API Key."
- Give it a name so you remember what it's for (e.g. "Spellro" or "personal projects").
- Copy the key immediately — it starts with
gsk_and is only shown once. If you lose it, you'll need to generate a new one.
Step 3: understand the free tier's limits
Instead of a dollar credit that runs out, Groq's free tier is rate-limited — you get a certain number of requests and tokens per minute and per day, varying by model. For light, everyday use (like correcting a paragraph of text a few dozen times a day), this is generally more than enough and effectively free indefinitely, rather than a trial that expires.
Step 4: keep your key private
Treat an API key like a password. Anyone with it can make requests billed to your account (or against your free-tier limits). Don't paste it into public code repositories, shared documents, or chat messages. Tools that use your key — like browser extensions — should store it locally on your device, not send it to their own servers.
What you can actually build or use with it
Any tool that supports a custom API key pointed at Groq's OpenAI-compatible endpoint can use your key — this includes some browser extensions, custom scripts, and no-code AI tools. The most common everyday use case for non-developers is exactly this: powering a grammar-correction or writing tool without paying a subscription fee to the tool's maker.
Spellro is built around this exact setup — connect a free Groq key once, and it powers unlimited grammar corrections in Chrome.
Add to ChromeA note on model names
Groq hosts several different models, and the "best" one changes as new versions are released. If a tool lets you type in a custom model name, a well-rounded general-purpose option (at the time of writing, something like a 70-billion-parameter Llama model) is a safe default for everyday text tasks.