A 14B-parameter multimodal model at a flat $0.20 per 1M tokens both directions — pricier than Pixtral 12B, but with double the context and performance Mistral compares to its own larger Small 3.2 24B.
Pixtral 12B was officially retired on December 2, 2025. Ministral 3 14B takes its place as Mistral's budget vision option, moving to a different model family in the process — Ministral rather than Pixtral — while keeping the same "cheap way to look at images" mission. Pricing moves to a flat $0.20 per 1M tokens, up from Pixtral's $0.15, but the context window doubles to 256K and Mistral's own model card places its performance in the same range as the much larger Small 3.2 24B.
It's a 14-billion-parameter open-weights model, which sets expectations correctly: this is a tool for volume vision tasks at a modest step up in capability from its predecessor, not a frontier brain that happens to see. The open release also means you can self-host it on a single GPU when API economics stop making sense.
Solid image understanding — captioning, OCR-ish reading, chart and screenshot description, content tagging — plus ordinary text chat in the same call, with headroom over Pixtral 12B thanks to the larger parameter count and Mistral's claimed Small 3.2-class performance. The 256K window fits more images and more surrounding text per request than Pixtral's 128K did, useful for batch processing.
The honest weakness: detail and reasoning. Fine-grained chart analysis, dense document layouts, and visual reasoning chains still belong to Opus 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, or GPT-5.5 — at many times the price.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ministral 3 14B | $0.20 | $0.20 | 256K |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite | $0.25 | $1.50 | 1M |
| GPT-5.4 mini | $0.75 | $4.50 | 400K |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 | $5 | 200K |
| Mistral Small 4 | $0.15 | $0.60 | 256K |
Every multimodal rival still charges more on output — Gemini Flash-Lite 7.5×, GPT-5.4 mini 22.5×. For pure "describe/tag/filter this image" volume, Ministral 3 14B remains near the price floor even after the increase from Pixtral 12B. The moment the task becomes "reason about this image", spend up.