Mistral Small 3 API Pricing
Mistral · context window 33K · prices updated 2026-09-15
Where Mistral Small 3 sits on price
At $0.08 per million output tokens, Mistral Small 3 is a budget tier model — 26.0× cheaper than the median output price of $2.08, which puts it in the cheapest 10% of everything we track. It sits 3th cheapest of the 25 Mistral models we track. Output is only 1.6× the input price, an unusually flat spread: long prompts hurt about as much as long answers, so prompt size is where the savings are.
What real workloads cost on Mistral Small 3
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.08/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill. | $0 | $130 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0 | $1.11 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0002 | $57.00 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Mistral Small 3 with caching and batch options.
Mistral Small 3 price history
Mistral Small 3's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 44 days of stability in a market where 78 of the 334 models we track have repriced over the same period, including 7 of Mistral's own 25 models.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
Mistral Small 3 vs Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta) — priced within a rounding error on output, with identical input pricing. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See Llama 3.1 8B Instruct pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Mistral models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Mistral Small 3 API cost?
Mistral Small 3 costs $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.08 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 12,500,000 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on Mistral Small 3?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0 per request and $130 per month on Mistral Small 3. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill Mistral Small 3's 33K context window?
Sending 33K of input in a single request costs $0.0016 at $0.05 per million tokens — before any output. There is no cached-input tier on this model, so every repeat of that context is billed at full price. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Mistral Small 3 worth the price?
Mistral Small 3 is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 99% of the models we track. At this price the question is not cost but capability: it is a good fit for classification, extraction, routing and bulk summarisation, and a poor fit for multi-step reasoning where a wrong answer costs more than the tokens saved.