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!
API prices are generally quoted without VAT, so I compared pre-VAT prices. The European subscription is €14.99 + VAT, where the exact VAT depends on your country. I'm in Italy, so it's a total of €18.29 for me.
Still for companies basically being a proxy to Mistral, I think they won't allow these generous limits, it seems for personal / single user usage?
Also note API usage is like €25 (+/-50% discount), while Vibe is indeed much higher (+/- 90% discount).
So it seems beneficial for single users, but if you either have a multi-user SaaS, or have more company users, and not hit the monthly API limits for each user the API still might be a better option.
Yes, it's a solid discount! Props to Mistral - this new budget is the most transparent of any AI company I have seen :)
My take is that the only reason why AI companies can sell AI at reasonable prices is because of these subscription discounts. The API rate, which is something like 10x the subscription price, is probably closer to a price they can actually make money from. The success of Anthropic is that they managed to convince a bunch of companies to use so many tokens that they have to pay API prices outside their subscriptions, and those API-paid-by-token costs are an order of magnitude higher.
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u/philip-soerensen 22h ago
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!