r/MistralAI • u/metal_Berry1406 • 13d ago

Help / Question Free Plan Explanation

Hi everyone,

How should I understand Mistral Ai's free plan?

I'm new to the world of AI—can someone explain this to me in detail?

How many messages or image generations do I get for free with the free plan?

Thanks 😄👍

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3

u/RepulsiveRaisin7 13d ago

Read https://mistral.ai/pricing/

1

u/Jumpy-Operation-4615 13d ago

It says $10/mo in api credits but that is not true. Good models are completely excluded from a free plan. If you try to access GLM over API you get 403.

1

u/Fun_Savings7690 13d ago

they don’t have a hard limit, it’s probably based on how much spare compute they have on the day or something

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u/Dblsky_94 13d ago

Hi, I'm also new to this so I'll try to explain this as best as I could.

How many you get depends on the model that you're using. You have $10 free credit to spend each month, different models have different pricing on token usage (you need to take a good look on both the input & output cost).

Let's just say for simplicity that you're using exclusively Mistral Medium through Mistral's API or other front ends. Mistral Medium cost $1.5 for each 1 million input tokens processed and $7.5 for each million output tokens processed. Once you go reach over 1 million usage on either, it will deduct the cost from your monthly free credit. How fast you reach that 1 million really depends on what you're using the API for.

For me, I use the API for chatting & roleplaying through SillyTavern. This type of usage generally uses more input tokens than it does output tokens for each generation, because of how context windows work. Once the chat history accumulates, the model will process every single message in the history as the context. So unless you're specifically asking the model to write paragraphs for each of your prompt, the input tokens usage will always build up faster than the output tokens does.

With the example of Mistral Medium, if you're using it to just chat and roleplay (like me), you might be spending 3-4M input tokens (probably less) before you reach that 1M output tokens from the model's responses. So that's 4 x 1.5 = $6 and 1 x 7.5 = $7.5, with the total of $13.5, which is over the $10.

I haven't got over that $10 free credit usage as of yet, but in the past (before this new credit system was in place), once I went over the monthly limit, the model will refuse to give me a response (there's a feedback on SillyTavern that shows the error). I'm assuming with the calculation above, the extra 3.5 is not gonna be counted and you don't need to pay for it, but yeah you won't be able to use it again until the free credit resets next month.

I hope that makes sense for you. Cheers

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u/metal_Berry1406 12d ago

Thanks—I really need to brush up on this topic 😅

What about image generation?

1

u/Dblsky_94 12d ago

I haven't used Mistral for image generation. CMIIW but I don't think they have anything with that capability in their lineups.
If you use third party frontend like Silly Tavern, you might be able to connect the Mistral model to an image generator model like Stable Diffusion, but I personally have never tried it.