Mistral sells the same models through four doors, and the right door depends on how much you use and how much you care about control. This lesson keeps the numbers honest: API prices come from our live catalogue, and paid Le Chat prices are left to the official pricing page because they change and we do not track them.
Le Chat Free
The free tier is the right starting point for everyone. You get chat with current models, web search, file upload and image tools, subject to daily limits. If you have never used Mistral, spend a week here before you pay for anything. Most people discover that their real usage is a handful of conversations a day, which the free tier covers.
Paid Le Chat tiers
Mistral offers paid individual and team tiers with higher limits and extra features. We do not list their prices because they are not in our pricing catalogue and they change; check mistral.ai/pricing for the current figures. The buying test is simple: pay only when you hit the free limits on most days or need a specific paid feature. Do not pay for headroom you never use.
API pay-as-you-go
The API has no monthly fee. You pay per million tokens, input and output priced separately. A typical chat turn is around 500 tokens in and 300 out. On Mistral Small 4 that is about $0.00026 per turn, so a thousand turns cost roughly 26 cents. On Mistral Large 3 the same thousand turns cost about 70 cents. The API is nearly always cheaper than a subscription for light use; the subscription only wins when you run long, heavy sessions every day.
Self-hosting the open weights
Because Mistral publishes so many models under Apache 2.0, the fourth option is to run them yourself. The per-token price is zero, but the total cost is not: you pay for GPU time, someone to operate it, and the quality gap if you can only fit a smaller model. This wins when you have steady, predictable volume, a strict data-residency rule, or hardware that is already idle. It loses at low volume, where a rented GPU sitting mostly unused costs more than the API would.
| You are | Start with | Move to |
|---|---|---|
| Curious, a few chats a day | Le Chat Free | A paid tier only if limits bite daily |
| Writer or analyst, many hours a day | Le Chat Free for a week | Paid Le Chat; compare on the official page |
| Developer building a feature | API with mistral-small-latest | Pinned dated id, batch for bulk |
| EU team with residency rules | API on EU hosting | Self-host Small or Ministral at scale |
Knowledge check
You send about 40 short prompts a day through Mistral Small 4 via the API. Roughly what is your monthly bill?