Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Small?

Mistral Small. On a task of 1,500 input and 500 output tokens across 3 calls, Mistral Small costs $0.00158 per task against $0.06000 for Claude Opus 4.8, which makes it 38.1x cheaper (a 97% saving).

How much do Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Small charge per million tokens?

Claude Opus 4.8: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Mistral Small: $0.15 input and $0.6 output. These are published list rates as of August 2026, excluding cached, batch and long-context tiers.

What does a million tasks cost on Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Small?

At the same fixed profile, one million tasks cost $60,000 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $1,575 on Mistral Small. The gap comes entirely from list-price differences, not from any difference in the work done.

Model price comparisons · August 2026

Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Small: API pricing compared

Same task, same tokens, two invoices. Every figure on this page is computed from our open pricing dataset, not copied from a blog post.

Mistral Small is 38.1x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.8 on a realistic task profile of 1,500 input and 500 output tokens per call, 3 calls per task: $0.00158 against $0.06000 per task, a 97% saving on identical work. Run a million tasks a month and that is the difference between $1,575 and $60,000.

Model	Input $/1M tok	Output $/1M tok	Output multiple	$/task	$/1M tasks
Claude Opus 4.8Anthropic · frontier	$5	$25	5x	$0.06000	$60,000
Mistral SmallMistral · value	$0.15	$0.6	4x	$0.00158	$1,575

Monthly bill at three volumes

Tasks / month	Claude Opus 4.8	Mistral Small	Gap
10,000	$600	$16	$584
100,000	$6,000	$158	$5,843
1,000,000	$60,000	$1,575	$58,425

Where the money goes on each

Claude Opus 4.8 prices output at 5x its input rate, so on this profile output is 63% of its task cost. Mistral Small prices output at 4x input, putting output at 57% of cost. The model with the higher output multiple rewards capping response length more; the one with the higher input share rewards prompt caching and context trimming more. Cost tells you nothing about quality: run both on twenty of your real cases before deciding, and treat the cheaper model as the default until it demonstrably fails.

Break-even against a dedicated GPU

Against a $2/hour dedicated instance ($1,460/month fixed), self-hosting overtakes Claude Opus 4.8 at 24,333 tasks per month and overtakes Mistral Small at 926,984 tasks per month, which exceeds the box's capacity, so it never wins. The full method is in the self-hosting break-even guide.

Pricing the self-hosted side? Compare on-demand GPU rates:

Compare GPU cloud pricing →

Plug your own token counts into the $/task calculator, or read the full ten-model pricing comparison.

Compare against other models

Frequently asked

Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Mistral Small?: Mistral Small. On a task of 1,500 input and 500 output tokens across 3 calls, Mistral Small costs $0.00158 per task against $0.06000 for Claude Opus 4.8, which makes it 38.1x cheaper (a 97% saving).
How much do Claude Opus 4.8 and Mistral Small charge per million tokens?: Claude Opus 4.8: $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. Mistral Small: $0.15 input and $0.6 output. These are published list rates as of August 2026, excluding cached, batch and long-context tiers.
What does a million tasks cost on Claude Opus 4.8 vs Mistral Small?: At the same fixed profile, one million tasks cost $60,000 on Claude Opus 4.8 and $1,575 on Mistral Small. The gap comes entirely from list-price differences, not from any difference in the work done.