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Ministral 3 3B

The smallest of the Ministral 3 family, a 3B dense model with a vision encoder under Apache 2.0, sized for edge and local deployment in base, instruct and reasoning variants.

Params
3.8B
Context
256K tokens
Released
License
Apache 2.0

Hosted API price

List price via Mistral · per 1M tokens

USD
Input
$0.10 /1M
Output
$0.10 /1M
Hosted by
Mistral 1 provider

Hosted API pricing

How we price

Order

Providers are listed cheapest input rate first, then by output rate, a tie going to the creator's own listing. A provider that lists the model without a published rate sits at the end.

Prices

Base-tier, on-demand rates in USD per 1M tokens, converted at ECB reference rates where a provider publishes in another currency. Cached-input and batch rates show only where a provider publishes them. "Cheapest" marks the one provider with the lowest input and output pair; a tie wears no badge.

Cost

Input rate times the input tokens plus output rate times the output tokens, at the monthly volume set above the table. Cached-input, batch, long-context and reasoning-token billing are not modelled.

Transparency and funding

  • Affiliates: Affiliate links are marked. We may earn a commission if you click them, but commissions never affect the order.

Every provider serving Ministral 3 3B, cheapest input first. Set your monthly volume to see what each would bill.

Every provider serving Ministral 3 3B, with its price per 1M input and output tokens and what the volume above would cost
Provider Input /1M Output /1M Cost at 10M in + 2M out Link
Mistral logo Mistral Creator $0.10 $0.10 $1.20 Visit website

Heads up: Base-tier, on-demand rates per 1M tokens; cached, batch and long-context tiers excluded. A provider may serve a shorter context or a quantized build than the creator's release. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Estimated cost to self-host

Ministral 3 3B needs about 8 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 1× RTX 3060 at about $50 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 504M tokens a month on Mistral's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Fits on 1 Single node ≤ 8
What it costs to self-host Ministral 3 3B at each precision: the memory it needs, the cheapest rental that holds it, that rental's month and the API volume it pays off at
Precision Memory Cheapest fit (32K context) Cost /mo Break-even vs API
4-bit INT4 / FP4 8 GB Nvidia logo 1× RTX 3060 $50 504M tokens /mo
8-bit FP8 / INT8 9 GB Nvidia logo 1× RTX 3060 $50 504M tokens /mo
16-bit FP16 / BF16 13 GB Nvidia logo 1× RTX 4060 Ti $86 864M tokens /mo

Estimates based on median on-demand rates for Nvidia GPUs. Memory is weights plus KV cache for one request, using FP8 KV cache where supported and FP16/BF16 otherwise. Break-even assumes a 5:1 input-to-output ratio. No guarantee of runtime support, usable performance, or that a matching quantized build exists. How we estimate costs.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest Ministral 3 3B by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Models priced nearest Ministral 3 3B per 1M tokens, each at its cheapest provider
Model Blended /1M Input /1M Output /1M Context Cutoff vs Ministral 3 3B
Nvidia Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B Nvidia $0.075 $0.05 $0.20 262K Jun 2025 −25%
Meta Llama 3 8B Meta $0.0833 $0.05 $0.25 8K Mar 2023 −17%
Alibaba Cloud Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B Alibaba Cloud $0.0917 $0.06 $0.25 262K −8%
Meta Llama 3.2 3B Meta $0.0983 $0.05 $0.34 128K Dec 2023 −2%
Alibaba Cloud Qwen3-30B-A3B FP8 Alibaba Cloud $0.0983 $0.05 $0.34 33K −2%
Mistral Ministral 3 3B This model Mistral $0.10 $0.10 $0.10 256K
Z.AI GLM-5.3-Flash Z.AI $0.1083 $0.08 $0.25 1M +8%
OpenAI GPT-5 Nano OpenAI $0.1083 $0.05 $0.40 400K May 2024 +8%
Alibaba Cloud Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Alibaba Cloud $0.1267 $0.06 $0.46 262K +27%
Alibaba Cloud Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Alibaba Cloud $0.1283 $0.07 $0.42 262K +28%
Google Cloud Gemma 3 27B Instruct Google Cloud $0.1333 $0.10 $0.30 128K Aug 2024 +33%

USD per 1M tokens at each model's cheapest listed provider. Blended is the cost of 10M input plus 2M output tokens, spread over the 12M.

Capabilities

What Ministral 3 3B accepts and can do, as published by Mistral.

  • Text Accepts and generates natural-language text.
  • Image Accepts images as input alongside text.
  • Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems.
  • Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON.
  • File upload Process uploaded documents, spreadsheets, and other files.

Common questions

What is Ministral 3 3B good for?

Edge and on-device deployment with vision. Apache 2.0 weights at the light end of the Ministral 3 family, and at the lower-cost end of Mistral's lineup when hosted.

When is Ministral 3 3B not a good fit?

Audio or video input, and any task where 3B parameters is too small: the 8B and 14B Ministral 3 variants sit above it. No maximum output length is published.

What is the cheapest way to run Ministral 3 3B?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Mistral charges $0.10 in / $0.10 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 1x RTX 3060 at $50 a month, which costs the same as about 504M tokens a month on that API.

Can I self-host Ministral 3 3B?

Yes. The weights are Apache 2.0 licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 8 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $50 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

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