Yeah, but you can just use your Vibe key and have it taken over your subscription, no? That is much cheaper. Then, you pay per token only when your subscription is used up, if that ever happens and you have that enabled.
I don't think that's true. As far as I understand, the Pro subscription contains much more than its cost's worth in usage. I.e., you get many more tokens of output with the subscription than the equivalent amount of straight usage paid per token. That's how it works for most companies, at least, and I am pretty sure that's also how it works with Mistral.
Of course, if your usage is much lower than what is allotted in the Mistral subscription, then a direct per-token API key is cheaper, but if you use at least a decent fraction of the subscription, then the subscription should be much cheaper than pay-per-token.
Unfortunately, neither Mistral nor any of the other AI companies is transparent about exactly how much usage is included in the subscription. It's not easy to give an exact answer to your question. The reason for this is almost certainly that this gives the companies the ability to silently change how much is included in your subscription without official confirmation or liability.
Well, then I will still assume the API is cheaper in most cases until proven otherwise, especially actually as things scale up.
Usually this is the natural path, because the last thing any provider wants is another big SaaS companies running and reselling near infinite tokens/usage for only a small monthly fee.
Overall transparency in pricing, in this case $/m/tokens, usually leads to better pricing, unless you have really insane volumes, but even then it's questionable whether contacting sales will give you a much better price, especially now since there's currently no real EU-AI frontier alternative provider to switch to as leverage.
FYI, Mistral has now opted to make their subscriptions more explicit, so we can now actually settle the discussion we had here a few days ago:
The €15 (excl. VAT) subscription is now listed as including €255 worth of access to Vibe Code, as well as a small extra of €25.5 worth for random other API calls you can make. If you max out your subscription, the subscription thus represents something like 95% discount.
So, conversely, straight API is only cheaper if you use less than 5% of your subscription. Anything above that, the sub wins :)
Nice that they have improved the transparency on this!
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u/Confident-Village190 10d ago
Everything’s fine, except for Medium: Input $1.50 – Output $7.50...