Mistral: Mistral Small 3 vs Recursive: Flint (free): Live Promos, Pricing, Hidden Fees & 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.
Recursive: Flint (free) (recursive/flint-v1.0:free) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Recursive: Flint (free): Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to 0/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Mistral: Mistral Small 3 (API ID: mistralai/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501) vs Recursive: Flint (free) (API ID: recursive/flint-v1.0:free), Recursive: Flint (free) offers lower standard input pricing at $0/1M tokens ($0/1M output), while Recursive: Flint (free) leads in cached prefix economics at $0/1M 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 | Recursive: Flint (free) | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | mistralai/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501 | recursive/flint-v1.0:free | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0.05 / $0.08 | $0 / $0 | Recursive: Flint (free) |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0.025/1M (50% Off) | $0/1M (50% Off) | Recursive: Flint (free) |
| Context Window / Max Output | 32K In / 16K Out | 256K In / 230K Out | Recursive: Flint (free) |
| 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
Flint is an open-weight mixture-of-experts model from Recursive, with about 2.5B active parameters out of 40B total, built by Recursive's autoresearch system Eureka Machine for cod
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 Recursive: Flint (free)
Flint is an open-weight mixture-of-experts model from Recursive, with about 2.5B active parameters out of 40B total, built by Recursive's autoresearch system Eureka Machine for cod Verified P90 latency of 280ms.