As of August 26, 2026, Pixtral-12B is 57% cheaper per million tokens than Grok 4 Fast. Grok 4 Fast is $0.20 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Pixtral-12B at $0.15 / $0.15. 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 4 Fast
xAI
Input
$0.20
Output
$0.50
Pixtral-12B
Mistral
Input
$0.15
Output
$0.15
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Grok 4 FastPixtral-12BVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. Pixtral-12B has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless Grok 4 Fast's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 26, 2026, Pixtral-12B is 57% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Pixtral-12B costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens ($0.30 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok 4 Fast costs $0.20 / $0.50 per million tokens ($0.70 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 4 Fast xAI API pricing is $0.20 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. 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.
Grok 4 Fast has a published LiveCodeBench score of 80%. Pixtral-12B does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok 4 Fast supports a 2M token context window, while Pixtral-12B supports 128K tokens. Grok 4 Fast 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.
Shared benchmark scores for Grok 4 Fast and Pixtral-12B are still limited. Check the comparison table for the evals each model has published. 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 4 Fast and Pixtral-12B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Pixtral-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 Grok 4 Fast through xAI 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 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 4 Fast supports up to 30K 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.
Grok 4 Fast runs at approximately 90 tokens/second while Pixtral-12B runs at 0.1 tokens/second. Grok 4 Fast 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 4 Fast 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. Grok 4 Fast costs $0.20/M input and $0.50/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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