As of August 25, 2026, Gemma 3 12B is 50% cheaper per million tokens than Pixtral-12B. Gemma 3 12B is $0.05 / $0.10 per million input/output tokens versus Pixtral-12B at $0.15 / $0.15. Sources: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/
Sources: Gemini API pricing (https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing); Mistral AI pricing (https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/)
Gemma 3 12B
Input
$0.05
Output
$0.10
Pixtral-12B
Mistral
Input
$0.15
Output
$0.15
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
MATH. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Gemma 3 12BPixtral-12BVerdict
Gemma 3 12B offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 25, 2026, Gemma 3 12B is 50% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Gemma 3 12B costs $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens ($0.15 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Pixtral-12B costs $0.15 / $0.15 per million tokens ($0.30 blended). Sources: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Gemma 3 12B Gemini API pricing is $0.05 input and $0.10 output per million tokens via Google. Pixtral-12B Mistral API pricing is $0.15 input and $0.15 output per million tokens via Mistral AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Gemma 3 12B has a published LiveCodeBench score of 24.6%. Pixtral-12B does not have that eval on this page yet.
Gemma 3 12B supports a 131K token context window, while Pixtral-12B supports 128K tokens. Gemma 3 12B offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Gemma 3 12B leads on 3 of 5 shared benchmarks versus Pixtral-12B's 2 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Gemma 3 12B and Pixtral-12B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Gemma 3 12B has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Gemma 3 12B through Google and Pixtral-12B through Mistral AI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published Gemini API pricing and Mistral API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Gemma 3 12B supports up to 131K output tokens per request, while Pixtral-12B supports up to 8K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Gemma 3 12B runs at approximately 33 tokens/second while Pixtral-12B runs at 0.1 tokens/second. Gemma 3 12B is faster in raw throughput. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Gemma 3 12B or Pixtral-12B from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Gemma 3 12B costs $0.05/M input and $0.10/M output. Pixtral-12B costs $0.15/M input and $0.15/M output via Mistral AI.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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