Mistral's smallest sub-4B powerhouse built for mobile phones, embedded devices, and ultra-high-frequency classification tasks.
Technical Specifications
- Provider
- Mistral AI
- Category
- lightweight
- Release Date
- 2024-10
- Batch API Discount
- 50% off async batch
- Consumer Subscription
- API Pay-as-you-go
- Reasoning Effort Control
- Fixed
- Structured Outputs
- Yes
- Output Modalities
- text
- Official Documentation
- Visit Official Docs ↗
Data Privacy, Licensing & Deployment Governance
Official Provider Release Intelligence, API Quotas & Agentic Specs
- Official API Model ID (SDK String)
- ministral-3b-latest
- Supported SDK & API Protocol
- Mistral AI REST API (OpenAI-Compatible)
- Lifecycle & Deprecation Status
- Legacy Stable (Upgrade path available in Mistral AI lineup)
- Production Rate Limits (RPM & TPM)
- 5,000 – 15,000 RPM (Production Tier) · 800,000 – 2,000,000 TPM
- Long-Context Pricing Tier (>128K / >200K)
- Flat rate ($0.04/1M in) across full 128K window
- Prompt Cache Write & TTL Policy
- Cached input at $0.02/1M tokens
- Computer Use & Browser GUI Agent
- API / CLI Tool-Use & DOM Agent ready (no raw pixel desktop click loop)
- MCP & Parallel Tool Calling
- Native MCP Client/Server ready · Parallel function calling · 100% Strict JSON Schema
- Web Search Grounding & Code Sandbox
- Supported via external Tavily/Exa Search & E2B/Docker Sandbox tools
- Fine-Tuning & Distillation Support
- API Prompt Engineering & RAG Distillation
- Multimodal Tokenization Billing
- Text BPE (~4 chars/token)
- Weights Precision & Quantization
- Cloud-Hosted Proprietary (FP8 / BF16 Tensor Core Cluster)
- Minimum GPU VRAM Requirement
- Zero Local VRAM Required (100% Serverless Cloud API)
- Supported Inference Engines
- Managed Mistral AI Cloud API
- System Card & Safety Framework
- Mistral AI Production Safety & Alignment Verified
- Enterprise Compliance (SOC2 / HIPAA / ZDR)
- SOC2 Type II · GDPR · Zero Data Retention (ZDR) & HIPAA BAA Available on Enterprise Tier
Ministral 3B Cost, Context, Hardware & API Integration
Pay-as-you-go API is cheaper for this volume (saves $17.60/mo vs $20 flat plan).
Break-even point: ~4,167 requests/day equals $20/month.
Same Monthly Workload Cost Across Popular Reference Models
Live Prompt Paste Tokenizer & Cost Counter
Paste real system instructions, JSON schemas, or code to measure BPE token counts across tokenizers.
Hybrid Prompt Routing Cascade Simulator
Route routine queries to a fast lightweight model ($0.15/1M) and escalate only complex reasoning turns to Ministral 3B:
Benchmark Scores & 6-Axis Capability Radar
- SWE-bench Verified
- 22.1%
- GPQA Diamond
- 32.5%
- MMLU-Pro
- 49.8%
- HumanEval
- 72.4%
- Humanity's Last Exam
- 2.4%
- Terminal-Bench
- 14.8%
- SciCode
- 15.2%
- LiveCodeBench
- 24.5%
- AIME
- 28.5%
- Long-Context Reasoning
- 60.5%
- Chatbot Arena Elo
- 1180pts
Strengths
- Massive 128K context window in a featherweight 3B parameter model
- Extremely high inference speed (180+ tokens/sec) on modest CPUs and mobile NPUs
- Ultra-cheap API price ($0.04 / 1M tokens)
- Great multi-language conversational fluency
Limitations & Trade-offs
- Struggles with advanced algorithmic programming
- Knowledge depth compressed due to tiny footprint
Editorial Assessment
The pocket rocket of the Mistral family, bringing 128K context to phone chips.
Best for: Smartphone native apps, IoT controllers, and instant prompt classification
Compare Ministral 3B
Frequently Asked Questions about Ministral 3B
How much does the Ministral 3B API cost per 1M tokens?+
Ministral 3B by Mistral AI is priced at $0.04 per 1M input tokens and $0.04 per 1M output tokens. With prompt caching enabled, cached input tokens cost $0.02 per 1M tokens, and asynchronous Batch API requests receive a 50% discount.
Should I use a $20/month subscription or the Ministral 3B pay-as-you-go API?+
A flat $20/month consumer subscription is predictable for daily interactive chat and manual coding. However, if you are building software, running automated workflows, or sending low-to-moderate volume with prompt caching enabled, the pay-as-you-go API is typically far more cost-effective and offers higher rate limits without manual UI caps.
How many words and pages fit in Ministral 3B's context window?+
Ministral 3B features a 128K tokens context window, which equals approximately 96,000 English words or ~256 standard single-spaced pages in a single prompt. Its maximum output generation per turn is 8,192 tokens.
Can I run Ministral 3B locally on my own GPU (Open Weights)?+
No, Ministral 3B is a proprietary closed-weights model hosted by Mistral AI. It cannot be downloaded for local GPU execution and must be accessed via Mistral AI's official API or cloud platform.
Does Mistral AI train on data sent to the Ministral 3B API, and is commercial use allowed?+
API payloads are excluded from model training by default. License tier: Proprietary Commercial API (Mistral AI Terms). Full commercial ownership of generated outputs. Supported deployment channels include: Mistral AI Cloud API & Enterprise Endpoints.
How does Ministral 3B perform on coding and reasoning benchmarks?+
Ministral 3B achieves a composite Intelligence Index of 33/100, scoring 22.1% on SWE-bench Verified, 32.5% on GPQA Diamond, 49.8% on MMLU-Pro, and 1180 pts on Chatbot Arena Elo.
What is Ministral 3B best used for?+
Ministral 3B is best suited for: Smartphone native apps, IoT controllers, and instant prompt classification. Assessment: The pocket rocket of the Mistral family, bringing 128K context to phone chips.
Mistral AI Family Lineage, Routing Tiers & Upgrade Path
Step down to a lighter sibling for high-volume routing or step up to Mistral AI's flagship reasoning tier:
Mistral Medium 3.5
Mistral Small 4
Devstral 2
Devstral Medium
Devstral Small
Mistral Small 3.2
AI Glossary & Architecture Concepts
View full glossary →Key machine learning concepts and benchmarks relevant to Ministral 3B:
The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing about 3 to 4 English characters or roughly 0.75 words. For example, the sentence "Artificial intelligence is fast" breaks down into about 5 tokens.
A standardized evaluation suite used to objectively measure and rank an AI model's capabilities across specific tasks — such as SWE-bench Verified for software engineering, AIME for competitive math, or MMLU for general knowledge.
The maximum number of tokens a model can consider at once — both the input it reads and the output it writes. A 1,000,000-token context window can hold roughly 750,000 English words in a single request.
The ability of a language model to recognize when an external capability is needed and output structured JSON arguments to invoke external APIs, databases, or terminal commands. The runtime executes the tool and passes results back to the model.
An open standard created by Anthropic that allows AI applications and agents to connect seamlessly to local filesystems, development environments, and third-party APIs via standardized server interfaces.
A cost and latency optimization where inference providers store pre-computed attention states for repeated prompt prefixes. Reusing cached tokens typically slashes API input costs by 50% to 90% and cuts TTFT substantially.
Benchmark scores, token prices, and rate limits evolve rapidly as AI labs release model updates. Always verify current specifications and pricing on the official provider documentation.