Mistral Medium 3.5 vs Gemini 3.8 Flash
Gemini 3.8 Flash is the better pick: it passed more tasks on the AIGROW small-business benchmark and has the lower list price. Mistral Medium 3.5 passed 8 of 20 tasks and costs $1.50 in and $7.50 out per million tokens; Gemini 3.8 Flash passed 18 and costs $0.75 in and $3.75 out.
AIGROW credit covers Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.2, Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 4 Argon. Gemini 4 Argon below list price
$25 a month brings $110 of API credit and cancels any time; $25 once buys $100. For long documents, Gemini 3.8 Flash reads up to 1.05M tokens at once and Mistral Medium 3.5 up to 256K. US dollars, standard rate, shortest context band. Cost per pass from the AIGROW small-business benchmark. Newer comparison: Mistral Large 4 vs Gemini 3.8 Flash
- Mistral Medium 3.5
- $7.40
- Tasks passed
- 8 of 20
- Gemini 3.8 Flash
- $7.17
- Tasks passed
- 18 of 20
AIGROW small-business benchmark, failed runs included.
Mistral's deprecated mid-tier model against Google's high-volume workhorse. Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $7.17 per 1,000 passing answers on the AIGROW small-business benchmark, Mistral Medium 3.5 $7.40. 1,000 support replies cost $7.50 on Mistral Medium 3.5 and $3.75 on Gemini 3.8 Flash, so Mistral Medium 3.5 costs twice as much.
What each one costs
The API price per million tokens and the cheapest app plan with each model, from the makers’ own pages. Each name opens that model’s full price page.
- Mistral Medium 3.5
- On the Mistral API, Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Vibe has a free plan and paid plans from $14.99/mo (Pro); the plan list does not name Mistral Medium 3.5. Plan prices read 22 October 2026.
- Gemini 3.8 Flash
- On the Google API, Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.
Side by side
Each maker’s published rate for its standard tier. Cached input is what a repeated prompt prefix costs once the provider has stored it.
| Fact | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Gemini 3.8 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Maker | Mistral | |
| Tier | Workhorses | Workhorses |
| Input, per M tokens | $1.50 | $0.75 |
| Output, per M tokens | $7.50 | $3.75 |
| Cached input | $0.15 | $0.075 |
| Context window | 256K | 1.05M |
| Released | 28 Apr 2026 | 2 Sep 2026 |
| Weights | Open weights | Closed weights |
What a job costs on each
1,000 runs of each job at the two list prices. The gap moves from job to job because the models price input, output and cached context differently.
| Job | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Gemini 3.8 Flash | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $7.50 | $3.75 | Gemini 3.8 Flash, 50% less |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $45.00 | $22.50 | Gemini 3.8 Flash, 50% less |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $48.00 | $24.00 | Gemini 3.8 Flash, 50% less |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are the makers’. A model with no published cache price bills the agent task’s repeated context at its full input rate.
The small print
What each base rate leaves out, from the makers’ own pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
- Mistral Medium 3.5
- Mistral deprecated it on 31 October 2026 and removed it from its pricing page, so these are the last prices it published, read 2026-10-15. It shuts down on 30 April 2027 and Mistral recommends Mistral Large 4 for new integrations. Open weights under a modified MIT license. Mistral’s pricing page
- Gemini 3.8 Flash
- Launch price through 2026-12-31; from 2027-01-01 it becomes $1.50 / $7.50, cached $0.15. Batch and Flex 50% off; Priority $1.35 / $6.75. Cache storage $0.50 per MTok per hour (rising to $1.00). Google’s pricing page
Other comparisons
Every head to head on the list that involves Mistral Medium 3.5 or Gemini 3.8 Flash.
Compare Mistral Medium 3.5 and Gemini 3.8 Flash with 52 other models
The price list sets every model’s input and output price side by side, with what a support reply, a document summary and an agent task cost on each.
Prices checked 12 November 2026