Cost per coding-agent request

Is Codestral or Mistral Large 3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, Mistral Large 3 costs 1.7x as much as Codestral per request ($0.012 vs $0.0070 on our measured traffic), because every Mistral Large 3 rate is 1.67 times Codestral's.

List prices: Mistral API pricing, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	Codestral	Mistral Large 3
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0043	$0.0071
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.011	$0.018
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0070	$0.012
100 requests	$0.70	$1.17
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.084	$0.14
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$8.91	$14.85

Each logged request priced at the vendor’s list rates for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request. Both models are priced on the requests up to 256K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

What to watch for

Mistral Large 3 is a general model and Codestral a code-completion model; neither is built for long agent loops, and both windows are smaller than about 12% of coding-agent requests. The comparison uses requests both can take.

FAQ

Is Codestral cheaper than Mistral Large 3 for coding agents?

Yes, at list prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.70 on Codestral and $1.17 on Mistral Large 3. A median 16-request session costs $0.084 vs $0.14. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 256K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of Mistral Large 3 vs Codestral cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $14.85 on Mistral Large 3 and $8.91 on Codestral at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

Codestral vs Mistral Large 3: which is better for agents?

Codestral scores higher on output quality (3.4/10 vs 3.4/10), while Codestral is the cheaper option. Codestral is best for fast completions and lightweight code edits; Mistral Large 3 is best for general open-weight text work where EU provenance matters. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between Codestral and Mistral Large 3 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models run on Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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per dollar.

Each step goes to the cheapest model that can do it, on providers we vet for price, uptime and speed, with automatic fallback when one fails.

Compliance: Opt-in rules keep a company, team or key on European or US providers
Privacy: We don’t train on your prompts or store them

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