Mistral API pricing
2 Mistral models tracked, updated daily. Full rates below, with guidance on which tier fits which workload.
Cached input rates and full detail on the pricing page. Prices in USD per 1M tokens.
Mistral runs a compact, clearly-tiered lineup — Mistral Small in the Budget tier and Mistral Medium in the Standard tier — priced competitively against the larger US providers for comparable capability. See the live table above for current rates.
Small vs. Medium
Mistral Small is a genuinely capable Budget-tier model, well suited to classification, extraction, summarization, and moderate chat workloads without the compromises sometimes seen in the cheapest tier from other providers. Mistral Medium steps up to Standard-tier general-purpose capability at a price that typically undercuts the equivalent Standard-tier models from OpenAI and Google — worth checking directly before defaulting to a larger provider out of habit.
Why teams choose Mistral specifically
Beyond raw price, Mistral is frequently chosen for two reasons that don't show up on a pricing table:
- European data residency and regulatory alignment. As a France-based provider, Mistral is a common default for teams with EU data-handling requirements or a preference for a non-US model provider — confirm current data-residency terms directly for your specific compliance needs.
- Efficient small-model performance. Mistral has consistently punched above its parameter count in independent evaluations, which is part of why Mistral Small competes credibly with Budget-tier offerings from providers with larger overall model families.
Practical guidance
Because Mistral's tiers are simpler than a full Budget/Standard/Premium spread, the routing decision is largely binary: use Small for high-volume, lower-complexity work, and move to Medium when task complexity genuinely requires it. Check current standing on the LiveBench cost-vs-quality chart before assuming Medium is necessary — Small frequently sits closer to the value frontier than its Budget-tier label might suggest.
When Mistral vs. a competitor
For general-purpose Standard-tier work, compare Mistral Medium directly against OpenAI and Google Standard-tier models on the compare page — price and capability are close enough that the comparison is worth making explicitly rather than assuming a larger provider is the safer default. For pure lowest-cost routing, also check Mistral Small against DeepSeek and Qwen.
See current Small-vs-Medium pricing live above, or put Mistral head-to-head with any competitor on compare.