As of August 25, 2026, Grok-3 Mini and Mistral Small have the same blended API cost at $0.80 per 1 million input plus 1 million output tokens. Grok-3 Mini is $0.30 / $0.50 per million tokens versus Mistral Small at $0.20 / $0.60. Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/
Sources: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models); Mistral AI pricing (https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/)
Grok-3 Mini
xAI
Input
$0.30
Output
$0.50
Mistral Small
Mistral
Input
$0.20
Output
$0.60
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.
MMLU. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Grok-3 MiniMistral SmallVerdict
Grok-3 Mini 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, Grok-3 Mini is 0% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens ($0.80 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Mistral Small costs $0.20 / $0.60 per million tokens ($0.80 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok-3 Mini xAI API pricing is $0.30 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Mistral Small Mistral API pricing is $0.20 input and $0.60 output per million tokens via Mistral AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok-3 Mini has a published LiveCodeBench score of 80.4%. Mistral Small does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok-3 Mini supports a 128K token context window, while Mistral Small supports 33K tokens. Grok-3 Mini 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.
Grok-3 Mini leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks versus Mistral Small's 0 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 Grok-3 Mini and Mistral Small are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Grok-3 Mini 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 Grok-3 Mini through xAI and Mistral Small 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 xAI API pricing and Mistral API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models 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.
Grok-3 Mini supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while Mistral Small supports up to 33K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Grok-3 Mini runs at approximately 100 tokens/second while Mistral Small runs at 0.1 tokens/second. Grok-3 Mini 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 Grok-3 Mini or Mistral Small 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. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. Mistral Small costs $0.20/M input and $0.60/M output via Mistral AI.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
The index
280 models across 33 providers. Search or jump to a lab — every model page stays linked here.
Next step
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