What the Mistral family is
Mistral AI publishes both general models and the Codestral coding models; the free terms differ between Mistral's own API and the platforms that rehost the open weights.
Providers offering Mistral on free terms
4 of the 25 providers detailed in this catalog list at least one Mistral model. Because Mistral AI publishes the weights rather than the service, the model id can be identical across all of them while the free allowance is not.
| Provider | Free access | Published limits | Card | Matching models |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral La Plateforme | Provider free tier | Enforced but not published | Not required | mistral-small-latest, open-mistral-nemo, codestral-latest |
| Pollinations.AI | Provider free tier | Enforced but not published | Not required | mistral |
| IBM watsonx.ai | Free trial credit | Enforced but not published | Not required | mistralai/mistral-large |
| Chutes | Metered access | Published per paid plan | Not required | unsloth/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 |
How the free terms actually differ
- Mistral La Plateforme — Mistral documents a Free mode (also referred to as the Experiment plan) that lets you activate a workspace and generate an API key without paying, but the public documentation does not currently expose a reachable rate-limit page for it: the tier URL listed in Mistral's own documentation index returns 404 as of the check date.
- Pollinations.AI — Pollinations exposes an OpenAI-compatible text endpoint that can be called without a key for basic use, and the official API docs do not publish RPM or RPD figures.
- IBM watsonx.ai — IBM offers a no-cost trial of watsonx.ai alongside the paid Essentials and Standard plans, and the pricing page invites you to start building at no cost.
- Chutes — Chutes prices inference per token and sells subscription plans that bundle a daily quota: Plus at $10/month with a bundled daily quota and 6% off pay-as-you-go rates beyond it, and Pro at $20/month with a larger daily quota and 10% off.
Picking one
0 of these 4 publish a fixed request count; the rest state a tier or a credit balance instead, which means the only honest answer to "how much is free" is the one in their console. 4 take no credit card. 3 answer a cross-origin browser request, so a key for those can be checked from the browser checker with nothing installed.
A model id that matches Mistral is not a promise that the free tier includes it. Providers move individual models between paid and free without changing the id, which is why each row links to the provider page carrying that provider's own wording and the date it was read.