Mistral AI
First-party API for Mistral's open and commercial models with a permanent free 'Experiment' plan requiring no credit card.
- Card required
- No
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'Experiment' plan, no credit card; public Mistral docs state limited free-mode rate limits and a token/month cap, but do not publish a numeric monthly token allowance.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.
Free value score
3.1 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
Models
10 freeLimits may be stale — last re-verified outside this section's freshness window.
| 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
Gotchas
- Evaluation & prototyping only
Mistral's official docs explicitly label the Experiment plan as 'intended for evaluation and prototyping only', not production use.
Sources
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"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/
Alternatives
Same category · similar quota
Zhipu AI's BigModel open platform exposes permanently free GLM 'Flash' models (GLM-4.5-Flash, GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.6V-Flash vision) with no credit card required.
Cloud-hosted open models at NATIVE weights (GLM 5.2 1M-ctx, Kimi K2.7 Code, DeepSeek V4 Pro) with a free tier in the $0 plan; Pro $20/mo (50x usage, 3 concurrent), Max $100/mo (5x Pro, 10 concurrent); zero data retention.
