#6 in LLM APIs & inferenceUsage-based

Mistral

European model lab with an API and open-weight models.

Mistral is a model lab. Le Chat is its consumer assistant. La Plateforme is the API, billed per token. Mistral also releases open-weight models you can self-host. The company is based in Europe.

Official site

Why this rank

Use Mistral when you want that lab's models, an EU provider, or weights you can run yourself. The API and Le Chat are different products.

Best for

Teams that want Mistral's models or a European API.

Pricing

The API is usage-based. Le Chat has its own free and paid plans. See mistral.ai/pricing. Self-hosting an open-weight model is your own infrastructure bill.

Pricing checked November 7, 2026. Confirm it on the official site.

Before you commit

A Le Chat subscription does not pay the API bill.
Open weights still cost you GPUs if you leave the hosted API.

Also look at

Groq — Fast inference for the open models Groq hosts.
OpenRouter — One API key for many models and providers.
Claude Platform — Anthropic's API for Claude models.