Growth tightness of free and amalgamated products

We show that every nontrivial free product, different from the infinite dihedral group, is growth tight with respect to any algebraic distance: that is, its exponential growth rate is strictly greater than the corresponding growth rate of any of its proper quotients. A similar property holds for the amalgamated product of residually finite groups over a finite subgroup. As a consequence, we provide examples of finitely generated groups of uniform exponential growth whose minimal growth is not realized by any generating set.