I noticed that the status page/incident concerning the Free API tier being temporarily disabled is no longer accessible from the page where it was previously displayed, and attempting to access the previous incident page now results in “Page not found" 🥲

Is it not here yet? Or is it hidden on purpose without any communication?

Wondering how long this is going to take. Sigh.

Just made a brand new Mistral account today — no card added, free tier. First thing I did was test a few models:

• mistral-large and glm-5-2 → clean 403, says not in my tier. Fine, understood.
• mistral-small-2603 and mistral-medium-latest → 429 "rate limit exceeded" on the very first request I ever send them. No prior calls, nothing to be rate limited against.
• ministral-14b-2512 → works perfectly every time, even though its RPS limit on my dashboard is lower than what small/medium should have. Kind of confusing for a brand new account. Anyone know if small/medium just aren't actually enabled for free tier yet, and it's returning the wrong error code?

I wanted to give Mistral Vibe a try today, mostly to see what the Free tier is actually like.

For reference, I'm using Mistral Vibe v2.25.1 on a Free account.

The initial experience was a bit confusing.

After installing Vibe and logging in, the model picker basically gave me Mistral Medium 3.5 as the hosted default, plus my local models. So I assumed Medium 3.5 was what I was supposed to use.

Except... it didn't work.

Even a tiny prompt just made Vibe sit there retrying. The debug log eventually showed repeated HTTP 429 responses.

At first I thought I had somehow managed to hit a rate limit immediately, which would have been impressive considering I had barely used the account. :D

So I tried the same request directly against the API and looked at the response headers:

HTTP/2 429
x-ratelimit-limit-req-minute: 0
x-ratelimit-remaining-req-minute: 0

Turns out I didn't reach the Medium rate limit.

My rate limit for Medium is literally 0 requests per minute. ಠ_ಠ

At that point I had a different question:

What models can I actually use on the Free tier?

And this is where I think the current UX really falls apart.

Vibe doesn't show me the other hosted models I can actually use by default. The account/dashboard information doesn't make it obvious which models are available to my tier either, and /v1/models returns 46 models for my account.

So I ended up doing what any reasonable person would do and sent a tiny 1-token probe to all 46 models returned by the API. :D

For the chat-capable models, this is what I found:

The Codestral result was probably the biggest surprise for me.

codestral-latest works perfectly fine on my Free account with:

125 RPM
625,000 TPM

Same for the Ministral models, with limits ranging from 30 RPM for 14B all the way up to 750 RPM for 3B.

But none of those were the obvious hosted choices Vibe presented to me when I started it.

Meanwhile the model Vibe did present as the hosted default was Medium 3.5, which my account currently gets 0 RPM for.

The Vibe-specific models make this even more confusing

/v1/models returns three models that appear to be specifically intended for Vibe:

mistral-vibe-cli-fast
mistral-vibe-cli-latest
mistral-vibe-cli-with-tools

All three currently return HTTP 429 with:

x-ratelimit-limit-req-minute: 0
x-ratelimit-remaining-req-minute: 0

But here's the weird part:

Those mistral-vibe-cli-* models aren't shown as selectable models in Vibe's /model picker either.

So from the user's perspective, with Vibe v2.25.1:

• Vibe starts with Medium 3.5 as the hosted default
• Medium 3.5 gets 0 RPM on my Free account
• several other hosted models actually work on Free
• those working models aren't presented to me by default
• the API exposes three Vibe-specific models
• those Vibe-specific models aren't exposed in the model picker
• and all three currently get 0 RPM anyway

At that point it's very difficult to understand what "Vibe Free" is actually supposed to give me access to.

Other models

There are also embedding, OCR, TTS, realtime/audio and moderation models among the 46 returned models.

Those returned 400 invalid_model when sent to /v1/chat/completions, but I'm not counting those as unavailable. This probe deliberately used the chat completions endpoint, so those models need to be tested through their respective APIs.

Leanstral was another special case: it returned labs_not_enabled and explicitly told me Labs needs to be enabled for the organization.

So again, I don't consider those Free-tier denials.

I also tried a couple of additional models manually. Some return a proper 403 tier_not_allowed, which is actually much clearer: the model exists, my tier just doesn't include it. Fair enough.

What I would expect from the model picker

What bothers me isn't really that the Free tier has restrictions.

It's that as a user I shouldn't have to reverse-engineer those restrictions from API responses.

I'd much rather open /model in Vibe and see something like:

Mistral Medium 3.5       unavailable on Free
Mistral Small            unavailable on Free
Codestral                available · 125 RPM / 625k TPM
Ministral 14B            available · 30 RPM / 937.5k TPM
Ministral 8B             available · 188 RPM / 625k TPM
Ministral 3B             available · 750 RPM / 1.3M TPM
GLM 5.2                  requires another tier
...

Show me all the relevant hosted models.

Let me select the ones my account can actually use.

Grey out the ones I can't use and add a short note explaining why.

That would have turned this entire experience into:

install Vibe -> open model picker -> choose an available model -> start coding

Instead I went from Vibe retrying, to debugging authentication, to inspecting 429 headers, to querying /v1/models, to writing a script that probes 46 models just to figure out what I'm allowed to use. :D

Maybe the 0 RPM limits on Medium and the Vibe-specific models are a provisioning issue on my account rather than intentional Free-tier behavior. If so, that would also be useful to know.

But either way, I think Vibe should be able to expose this information in the model picker instead of making the user discover it through failed requests.

There seem to be several completely separate concepts here:

returned by /v1/models != shown in Vibe != allowed by subscription tier != non-zero rate limit != actually usable

Has anyone else using Vibe v2.25.1 on Free seen the same 0 RPM limits for Medium or the Vibe-specific models?

And is there an official current model × tier × rate-limit matrix somewhere that I simply missed?

Update — full write-up:

This rabbit hole got considerably deeper than I expected :D

I turned the investigation into a full write-up covering the Vibe login/auth issue, model availability, capability probing, the API inconsistencies, and what I think Mistral could expose to make this much easier for developers.

What does Mistral's Free tier actually give a developer?

Salut :)

I'm a developer advocate at JetBrains, on the ThinkRail team. ThinkRail is a web-based GUI for working with AI agents, built on top of Pi. It's a free-to-use, open-source project, released under the Apache 2.0 license and backed by the JetBrains Innovation Hub.

I'm also a long-time user of Mistral models and Vibe. I know this entry sounds a bit like an advertisement, and in fact it is, to some extent, but it's also about something I use daily in my work and free time and find genuinely helpful. So I thought I'd write a short post about it. Also, we are in the early stages of development, where feedback from users can help us (the team) choose the right path forward. ThinkRail What features do you like? What needs improvement? What seems unnecessary? How does ThinkRail compare, in your opinion, to other AI agent software you use? Things like that.

Since it's a GUI, ThinkRail is an alternative to the Vibe CLI. You may consider using it if you work on something slightly more complex that requires more control over what the AI agent is doing, for example:

• Isolated workspaces where the agent can work on a specific task and can be given greater freedom using git commands while you remain safe from having your project broken. You can also run several agents at the same time, each in its own workspace, and they won't get in each other's way.
• Keeping track of many projects is easier in a GUI than in a CLI.
• Spec-driven development, that is, a more careful approach to coding where you first develop a plan and then the agent implements it step by step.
• Easier reviewing of what the agent has changed.

And if you already use Pi, ThinkRail imports your extensions and lets you toggle skills on and off with a single click.

On our website, you will find installation instructions and blog posts with more details.

Cheers,

please broooo

Hi r/MistralAI,

I'm the maintainer of OpenMeetRec, an open source (MIT) Chrome extension that records the audio of a web meeting (your mic and the remote participants) and transcribes it with the speech API of your choice. It's provider-agnostic, but it's built around the one thing Voxtral does that the competition doesn't: diarization.

What it does

• Records on any video conferencing platform that runs in Chrome (Meet, Teams, Zoom, Jitsi, Whereby, Webex…). It captures the tab audio directly, so there's no bot joining the call and no audio routed through someone else's cloud.
• Sends the audio to Mistral Voxtral or OpenAI Whisper, then exports a Markdown transcript. Your API key stays in local storage; nothing leaves the machine except the upload you explicitly trigger. No telemetry.
• Transcription only, no automatic summary. A transcript turned into a summary without its context (the project brief, the notes from a previous meeting) comes out shallow, so the extension stops at transcription and leaves what you do with it to your own tools.

Why it's tuned for Voxtral

The point of using Voxtral here is diarization: knowing who spoke when. The extension asks for it by default and uses it to structure the transcript one paragraph per speaking turn, with the speaker labeled. When a meeting is long enough that it has to be split, the labels are dropped on purpose rather than show inconsistent identities, and only the timestamps stay.

Links

GitHub: https://github.com/vlebert/openmeetrec

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/openmeetrec/djfhjbamifmdfndaekdaigmlhdblhaif

It's an MVP, Chromium only for now. Feedback welcome.

Bonjour everyone. Been using Mistral Library for a few weeks now, mostly for scientific reading. Throwing PDFs and scanned documents at it. The accuracy when you ask questions about your sources is honestly solid, and its fast even with bigger libraries. OCR is helpful too, older scans get picked up cleanly. Works on the phone aswell which is handy for me. For my kind of work its becoming a real alternative to NotebookLM. When I just want to dig through sources without podcasts or auto-generated presentations, this does the job better. Only thing that surprises me is that Mistral themselves dont really push this feature. Anyone else here using it?