Mistral AI

LLM 3.1/10 Jul 4, 2026

First-party API for Mistral's open and commercial models with a permanent free 'Experiment' plan requiring no credit card.

Mistral AI scores 3.1/10 for free value in LLM. The main constraint: Free 'Experiment' plan, no credit card; public Mistral docs state limited free-mode rate limits and a token/month cap, but do not publish a numeric monthly token allowance. Prompts may be used to improve models.

Category LLM Kind Hosted first-party LLM API Caveats Free-tier prompts may be used to train models (can be disabled in Settings -> Data training). The numeric free token/month amount is not published in Mistral's public docs; current limits must be checked in Studio Admin -> Limits. The plan is officially for evaluation/prototyping only. Renewal monthly Card required No Eligibility anyone

Free value score

3.1 / 10

Show the math

Model Quality 2.2/10

value = 12 artificial_analysis_score

weighted score = 0.67 * 2.2/10

Access 5/10

value = 5/10

weighted score = 0.33 * 5/10

Key metrics

Mistral Medium 3.5 12 Best model

No Commercial use evaluation & prototyping only

Models

10 free

Model	Family	AA	Access
Mistral Medium 3.5	—	29.9	free
Mistral Small 4	—	20.8	free
Mistral Large 3	—	16.2	free
Mistral Medium 3.1	—	12.5	free
Codestral	—	—	free
Devstral 2	—	—	free
Magistral Medium 1.2	—	—	free
Magistral Small 1.2	—	—	free
Ministral 3 14B	—	—	free
Ministral 3 8B	—	—	free

What you get

Permanent free plan, not a finite trial

OpenAI SDK-compatible base URL

Frontier suite: Mistral Large 3, Medium 3.5, Small 4, Codestral, Pixtral — 256K context

No credit card required to sign up

Limitations

Evaluation & prototyping only

Mistral's official docs explicitly label the Experiment plan as 'intended for evaluation and prototyping only', not production use.

Sources

"The free API tier is intended for evaluation and prototyping only. You have access to the free tier with limited rate limits. To increase your limits, you must upgrade to a Scale plan."
https://docs.mistral.ai/admin/user-management-finops/tier
"La Plateforme, the serverless platform to tune and build with Mistral models as API endpoints, now offers a free tier enabling developers to get started with experimentation, evaluation, and prototyping at no cost."
https://mistral.ai/news/september-24-release
"Mistral Large 3 is below Mistral Medium 3.5 on the current Artificial Analysis mirror; Medium 3.5 is the stronger free-tier model for this card."
https://benchlm.ai/benchmarks/artificialAnalysis
"We are announcing a Series C funding round of 1.7B€ at a 11.7B€ post-money valuation."
https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accelerate-technological-progress-with-ai/

llm-api openai-compatible free-tier code multimodal

Open service Source ← All LLM