Mistral: Mistral Small 3 vs DeepSeek: R1 0528: Live Promos, Pricing, Hidden Fees & Latency
Verified 2026 FinOps benchmark comparing Mistral: Mistral Small 3 (mistralai/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501) vs DeepSeek: R1 0528 (deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528). Simulate cache read multipliers, context cliffs, MAU bills, and P90 latency.
Mistral: Mistral Small 3 (mistralai/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Mistral: Mistral Small 3: Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to $0.025/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
DeepSeek: R1 0528 (deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528) — Automatic Disk KV Cache ($0.25/1M) & Off-Peak Promo
DeepSeek-V4 Pro (1.6T MoE) automatically caches repeated 64-token prompt prefixes on NVMe storage at $0.07/1M input tokens (50% off $0.14 base) with zero code changes required, plus off-peak UTC scheduling discounts.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Mistral: Mistral Small 3 (API ID: mistralai/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501) vs DeepSeek: R1 0528 (API ID: deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528), Mistral: Mistral Small 3 offers lower standard input pricing at $0.05/1M tokens ($0.08/1M output), while Mistral: Mistral Small 3 leads in cached prefix economics at $0.025/1M tokens (50% discount). Mistral: Mistral Small 3 achieves a 0ms faster P90 time-to-first-token latency (280ms vs 280ms).
Auto-discovered via live global telemetry registry.
Auto-discovered via live global telemetry registry.
| Specification / FinOps Dimension | Mistral: Mistral Small 3 | DeepSeek: R1 0528 | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | mistralai/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501 | deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528 | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0.05 / $0.08 | $0.5 / $2.15 | Mistral: Mistral Small 3 |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0.025/1M (50% Off) | $0.25/1M (50% Off) | Mistral: Mistral Small 3 |
| Context Window / Max Output | 32K In / 16K Out | 160K In / 32K Out | DeepSeek: R1 0528 |
| P90 First-Token / Edge Latency | 280ms | 280ms | Mistral: Mistral Small 3 (-0ms) |
Mistral Small 3 is a 24B-parameter language model optimized for low-latency performance across common AI tasks. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, it features both pre-trained
May 28th update to the [original DeepSeek R1](/deepseek/deepseek-r1) Performance on par with [OpenAI o1](/openai/o1), but open-sourced and with fully open reasoning tokens. It's 67
Real-Time Stack Cost & Hidden-Fee Simulator (MAU / Token / Egress / GMV)
Calibrated with Reddit r/FinOps & r/devops telemetry: Includes Context Caching, Bandwidth Egress, and MoR Tax
🛰️Switch from Mistral: Mistral Small 3 to DeepSeek: R1 0528
May 28th update to the [original DeepSeek R1](/deepseek/deepseek-r1) Performance on par with [OpenAI o1](/openai/o1), but open-sourced and with fully open reasoning tokens. It's 67 Verified P90 latency of 280ms.