As of August 25, 2026, Pixtral-12B is 30% cheaper per million tokens than Phi 4 Mini. Phi 4 Mini is $0.08 / $0.35 per million input/output tokens versus Pixtral-12B at $0.15 / $0.15. Sources: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/
Sources: OpenRouter pricing (https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models); Mistral AI pricing (https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/)
Phi 4 Mini
Microsoft
Input
$0.08
Output
$0.35
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.
Phi 4 MiniPixtral-12BVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. Pixtral-12B has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless Phi 4 Mini's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 25, 2026, Pixtral-12B is 30% 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). Phi 4 Mini costs $0.08 / $0.35 per million tokens ($0.43 blended). Sources: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Phi 4 Mini OpenRouter API pricing is $0.08 input and $0.35 output per million tokens via OpenRouter. 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%. Phi 4 Mini does not have that eval on this page yet.
Phi 4 Mini supports a 131K token context window, while Pixtral-12B supports 128K tokens. Phi 4 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.
Phi 4 Mini and Pixtral-12B are tied across 2 shared benchmarks. Check the table for category-level strengths. 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 Phi 4 Mini 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 Phi 4 Mini through OpenRouter 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 OpenRouter API pricing and Mistral API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/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.
Phi 4 Mini supports up to an unspecified number of 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.
Pixtral-12B has a measured throughput of approximately 0.1 tokens/second. Throughput data for Phi 4 Mini is not yet available. 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 Phi 4 Mini 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. Phi 4 Mini costs $0.08/M input and $0.35/M output via OpenRouter. 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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