A lean, fast, affordable workhorse for text tasks — ideal for scale, not for depth.
68
Coding
74
Writing
58
Research
0
Images
92
Value
30
Long Context
Use this when
High-volume, cost-sensitive applications like customer support automation, content drafting, and lightweight code assistance.
Strengths
Extremely low cost at ~$0.05/1M input tokens, undercutting GPT-4o Mini and Claude Haiku on price
Strong instruction-following for its size, suitable for structured output and classification tasks
Fast inference makes it viable for real-time or high-throughput pipelines
Multilingual capability with solid French, Spanish, German, and Italian support — expected from Mistral
Weaknesses
32K context window is significantly smaller than competitors like Gemini Flash (1M) or Claude Haiku (200K)
Monthly cost estimate
See what Mistral: Mistral Small 3 actually costs at your usage level
Input tokens / month1M
10k50M
Output tokens / month500k
10k25M
Input cost
$0.050
Output cost
$0.040
Total / month
$0.090
Based on Mistral: Mistral Small 3 API pricing: $0.049999999999999996/1M input · $0.08/1M output. Real costs vary by provider discounts and caching. Check the provider for exact current rates.
Price History
Mistral: Mistral Small 3 pricing over time
↓86% since May 9
4 data points · tracked daily since May 9, 2026
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High-volume, cost-sensitive applications like customer support automation, content drafting, and lightweight code assistance.. Start free — no card required.
Recommendations are made independently based on real-world use and public benchmarks. See our disclosures for details.
Compare alternatives
Similar models worth checking before you commit.
MistralBudget
Mistral: Mistral Large 3 2512
Mistral Large 3 2512 is Mistral's flagship dense model updated in December 2025, offering strong multilingual reasoning and coding capabilities at a significantly reduced price point compared to its predecessor. It targets enterprise workloads that need high-quality outputs without paying top-tier frontier model prices.
Verdict
The best price-per-quality ratio in the non-mini flagship tier, especially for multilingual and long-context enterprise tasks.
Quality score
69%
Pricing
$2.00/1M in
$6.00/1M out
Speed
Change history
Pricing moves, ranking shifts, and capability updates.
PricingMay 12, 2026
Mistral: Mistral Small 3 — output price cut
Mistral: Mistral Small 3 output pricing changed from $0.56/1M to $0.08/1M (↓ cheaper, 86% cut).
Mistral: Mistral Small 3 is best for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications like customer support automation, content drafting, and lightweight code assistance.. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and very fast speed.
When should I avoid Mistral: Mistral Small 3?
You need to process long documents, perform complex multi-step reasoning, or handle any visual/multimodal inputs.
What is a cheaper alternative to Mistral: Mistral Small 3?
Meta: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is the lower-cost option to compare first when you want a similar workflow fit with less token spend.
What is a faster alternative to Mistral: Mistral Small 3?
Mistral: Mistral Large 3 2512 is the better pick when response time matters more than maximum depth or premium quality.
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Skip this if
You need to process long documents, perform complex multi-step reasoning, or handle any visual/multimodal inputs.
Reasoning depth falls short of larger models; complex multi-step logic produces inconsistent results
Limited multimodal capability — text-only, no image input or generation
Balanced
Best for multilingual enterprise tasks, code generation, and long-document analysis where cost efficiency matters more than absolute state-of-the-art performance.
Context
262k tokens
Pricing of $0.50 input / $1.50 output per 1M tokens places it firmly in the budget-flagship category. Available via Mistral API (La Plateforme) and major cloud providers. December 2025 update ('2512') improves instruction following over the earlier 2407 release.
Multilingual enterprise tasks, code generation, and long-document analysis where cost efficiency matters more than absolute state-of-the-art performance.
Mistral Small 3.2 24B is a compact 24-billion parameter model from Mistral that punches well above its weight class, superseding Mistral Large 2 at a fraction of the cost. It handles coding, instruction-following, and multilingual tasks with strong efficiency for its size.
Verdict
The best budget coding model available today, offering frontier-adjacent performance at commodity pricing.
Quality score
68%
Pricing
$0.07/1M in
$0.20/1M out
Speed
Fast
Best for high-volume production workloads where cost matters but quality can't be sacrificed entirely — especially code generation and structured output tasks.
Context
128k tokens
Mistral Small 3.2 is available as an open-weight model, making it deployable on-premises or via self-hosted infrastructure — a key differentiator over GPT-4o Mini and Claude Haiku for privacy-sensitive use cases.
BudgetCodingEfficientOpen-weightMultilingual
Best for
High-volume production workloads where cost matters but quality can't be sacrificed entirely — especially code generation and structured output tasks.
Mistral: Mistral Small 3 (Mistral) is now indexed. It supersedes Mistral Large 2. A lean, fast, affordable workhorse for text tasks — ideal for scale, not for depth.
