Mistral AI has launched a new free plan to allow developers to tweak and build test apps with its AI models, it announced in a blog post on Tuesday. The company also significantly lowered the price for developers to access its AI models through API endpoints and added image processing capabilities to its free consumer AI chatbot, Le Chat.
Providing more for less is a growing trend in the world of AI model providers, and the Paris-based startup, recently valued at $6 billion, announced several updates on Tuesday to attract developers. Advanced LLMs are becoming a commodity in the developer world, and Mistral is trying to compete as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic offer plummeting developer prices.
OpenAI and Google also offer free tiers for developers to test their AI models, and both have lower rate limits than their paid tiers.
Mistral's new tier is available through its API-delivery platform, La Plateforme, and the company says it allows developers to experiment, evaluate and prototype AI models for free, though developers may need to upgrade to Mistral's paid commercial tier, which has higher rate limits, to use Mistral's models in production.
So why should Mistral, which claims to have “open” AI models, offer a free tier for building with its AI tools? While users can download Mistral's AI models and use them under the Apache 2.0 license, setting up infrastructure to host these AI models can be complicated. Le Plateforme offers developers an easy experience, acquiring users to build on Mistral's platform that can then be upsold with higher rate limits.
Mistral has also reduced the prices for accessing Mistral Nemo, Mistral Small and Codestral via API endpoints by more than 50%, and reduced the price of Mistral Large by 33%.
Finally, Mistral's first multimodal model, Pixtral 12B, can process images as well as text and is now available for the company's consumer AI chatbot, Le Chat. The startup announced a new AI model last week that allows users to scan, analyze, and search image files.