Mistral AI
Mistral AI develops efficient small-language models optimized for European deployment and multilingual support. Mistral Large 2 and Codestral provide competitive performance in a compact 12B-7B parameter footprint. Their Apache 2.0 licensed models are among the most commercially friendly open models available, enabling deployment without licensing restrictions.
Why Choose Mistral AI?
Mistral NeMo 12B uses a Sliding Window Attention mechanism combined with grouped-query attention, achieving 3x faster inference than dense equivalents while maintaining competitive quality. Their model architecture is designed for European language support with native multilingual pre-training across 12 languages. Codestral uses a fill-mask architecture that generates code completions by predicting the next masked token, enabling faster inference on consumer hardware. The Apache 2.0 license permits commercial use without attribution requirements, distinguishing Mistral from Meta's community license which has usage restrictions.
Pricing Overview
Mistral NeMo 12B API costs $0.15/M input/output tokens. A $10 trial credit is available without a credit card. Self-hosting requires only 24GB VRAM (RTX 4090). The Apache 2.0 license makes Mistral models freely deployable in commercial products without licensing fees.
Official Model Portfolio (7)
| MODEL | CONTEXT | INPUT $/1M | OUTPUT $/1M | SPEED | FREE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral Small v2409 24B | 128K | $0.10 | $0.10 | 70 tok/s | — |
| Mistral NeMo 12B | 128K | $0.07 | $0.09 | 120 tok/s | — |
| Codestral 22B | 32K | $0.30 | $0.90 | 55 tok/s | — |
| Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | 65K | $0.50 | $0.50 | 25 tok/s | — |
| Mistral 7B v0.3 | 32K | $0.06 | $0.06 | 250 tok/s | — |
| Mistral Large | 128K | $0.20 | $0.60 | 30 tok/s | — |
| Codestral 22B | 128K | $0.00 | $0.00 | 1 tok/s | Yes |
🧠 Hardware Hosting Sizing
| MODEL | FP16 VRAM | INT4 VRAM | MIN GPU | CHEAPEST CLOUD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral Small v2409 24B | 48 GB | 14 GB | RTX 4090 24GB | View Deals → |
| Mistral NeMo 12B | 24 GB | 8 GB | RTX 4090 24GB | View Deals → |
| Codestral 22B | 44 GB | 14 GB | RTX 4090 24GB | View Deals → |
| Mixtral 8x22B Instruct | 280 GB | 80 GB | 4x H100 80GB | View Deals → |
| Mistral 7B v0.3 | 14 GB | 5 GB | RTX 4090 24GB | View Deals → |