Groq's free Whisper tier is quoted as "2,000 requests a day," but that's not the limit you'll hit. The rate-limit table has two columns most people skip: ASH and ASD — audio seconds per hour and per day.
For whisper-large-v3 and whisper-large-v3-turbo on the free plan: 20 requests/min, 2,000/day, 7,200 audio-seconds per hour, 28,800 per day.
7,200 audio-seconds is 2 hours of audio per clock hour. 28,800 is 8 hours of audio per day. So a batch job transcribing a podcast backlog saturates the hourly window with just 4 requests if the files are 30 minutes each — while the request counter has barely moved.
Practical fix: chunk long audio and pace submissions against seconds, not requests. The 429 you get back doesn't distinguish which ceiling you hit.
How Groq compares with the other transcription free tiers: https://toolfreebie.com/free-whisper-api-compared/
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