Mistral Small
Mistral Small is worth evaluating for classification and json / tool use when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating classification and json / tool use
- Workloads that can use a 32k context window
- Buyers comparing 4 tracked provider routes
Do not use it for
- Vision or document-understanding workloads
- Family
- Mistral Small
- Released
- 2024-02-26
- Context
- 32k
- Parameters
- 22B
- Architecture
- Decoder Only
- Specialization
- general
- Openness
- Open source
- License
- Apache 2.0OSI-approvedCommercial use: permitted
- Training
- Fine-tuned
Cheapest of 5 routes · Mistral AI Studio
About
Mistral Small is a language model from MistralAI. It offers a 32K-token context window.
Mistral Small (API identifier: mistral-small-2402) is Mistral AI's first-generation Small tier model, released in February 2024 as part of a commercial API family that offered three capability tiers: Mistral Tiny, Mistral Small, and Mistral Medium. It is positioned above the open-source Mixtral 8x7B in Mistral's capability hierarchy. The model supports a 32,768-token context window, multilingual instruction following across European languages, and tool calling for structured API interactions. Specific parameter counts for this commercial tier have not been publicly disclosed by Mistral AI.
Mistral Small targets cost-efficient production deployments requiring strong instruction following, code generation, and multilingual support without the premium of the Medium or Large tiers. It supports multiple European languages and delivers reliable performance on classification, summarization, code assistance, and structured extraction tasks at lower cost per token than the higher tiers.
The model is available through Mistral AI's API, AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, Fireworks AI, and DeepInfra. Later versions—Mistral Small 2 (September 2024, 22B parameters), Mistral Small 3, 3.1, and 4—have substantially superseded this release with improved benchmarks, updated context windows, and in later variants, vision capability. The original mistral-small-2402 remains available for legacy integrations.
Mistral Small has a 32k-token context window.
Mistral Small input tokens at $0.1/1M, output at $0.3/1M.
Top use-case fit
Classification
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
JSON / Tool use
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare all 5Compare API pricing across 4 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral AI Studio | $0.100 | $0.300 | Serverless |
| AWS Bedrock | $1.00 | $3.00 | Serverless |
| Microsoft Foundry | $1.00 | $3.00 | Provisioned |
| DeepInfra | - | - | ServerlessPartial |
Available via routers & gateways(14)
AIRouter
RouterCommercial LLM router that analyzes incoming requests and routes to the optimal model for cost/quality/latency via a drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, with a privacy-preserving embedding mode that avoids sending prompt content.
Amazon Bedrock Intelligent Prompt Routing
RouterAWS Bedrock's native intelligent prompt router that routes prompts between Anthropic Claude model tiers (Haiku/Sonnet) based on predicted task complexity, with no extra per-routing charge.
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Helicone
GatewayObservability-first AI gateway with routing, caching, rate limiting, and request tracing; Apache 2.0 open-source core with a managed hosted tier for logging and analytics.
Kong AI Gateway
GatewayMulti-LLM AI gateway built on Kong Gateway 3.x, adding semantic routing, load balancing, guardrails, and MCP traffic analytics as plugins over Kong's existing API management platform.
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Classification
No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
Comparison and alternatives
Browse all comparisons →Cheapest of 5 routes · Mistral AI Studio