Is Mistral Small 3 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Mistral Small 3 on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, Mistral Small 3 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. gpt-oss-20b scores 53.8 higher and costs 37% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
gpt-oss-20b is both better and cheaper than Mistral Small 3: 53.8 points higher on LMArena and 37% less per million tokens, $0.02 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1233.5
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.058/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1287.3
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.036/M
Mistral Small 3 takes text, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 32,768-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 1 model dominates it and gives up nothing, none does so with a trade-off. Mistral Small 3 scores 1233.5 at $0.06 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-oss-20b | 1287.3 +53.8 | $0.036/M | 37% |
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