As of August 26, 2026, Pixtral-12B is 63% cheaper per million tokens than Mistral Small. Mistral Small is $0.20 / $0.60 per million input/output tokens versus Pixtral-12B at $0.15 / $0.15. Source: https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/
Source: Mistral AI pricing (https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/)
Mistral Small
Mistral
Input
$0.20
Output
$0.60
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.
MMLU. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Mistral SmallPixtral-12BVerdict
Pixtral-12B offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 26, 2026, Pixtral-12B is 63% 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). Mistral Small costs $0.20 / $0.60 per million tokens ($0.80 blended). Sources: https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/ and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Mistral Small Mistral API pricing is $0.20 input and $0.60 output per million tokens via Mistral AI. 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.
Pixtral-12B has a published HumanEval score of 72%. Mistral Small does not have that eval on this page yet.
Mistral Small supports a 33K token context window, while Pixtral-12B supports 128K tokens. Pixtral-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.
Pixtral-12B 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 Mistral Small 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 Mistral Small through Mistral AI 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 Mistral API pricing and Mistral API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/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.
Mistral Small supports up to 33K 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.
Mistral Small runs at approximately 0.1 tokens/second while Pixtral-12B runs at 0.1 tokens/second. Pixtral-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 Mistral Small 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. Mistral Small costs $0.20/M input and $0.60/M output via Mistral AI. 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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