Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is the pick when you need reasoning / thinking mode, Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Aion Labs | Mistral AI |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.70 | $0.07 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $1.40 | $0.07 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.87 | $0.07 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 42% | 84% |
| Context window | 262K tokens (~393 pages) | 262K tokens (~393 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 48% | 48% |
| Max output per response | 33K tokens (~24,600 words) | 210K tokens (~157,300 words) |
| Input types | text | text, image |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-23 | 2025-12-02 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $80.50 | $7.13 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $73.38 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $98.00 | $9.75 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $88.25 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $101 | $9.90 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $90.90 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $64.40 | $6.45 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $57.95 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $36.40 | $3.82 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $32.57 |
| Capability | AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | — | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | — | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | — | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | — | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
| Date | Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-10 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | $0.07 | $0.07 |
Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is the pick when you need reasoning / thinking mode, Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) when cost matters at scale. In short: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini when you need reasoning / thinking mode, you want the newer model; Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) when cost matters at scale, you need image input, you need seed (reproducible sampling), you generate long outputs in one go.
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) is cheaper: $0.07 vs $0.87 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 91% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $7.13 against $80.50.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini costs $0.70 per 1M input tokens and $1.40 per 1M output tokens; Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) costs $0.07 input and $0.07 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Both take 262K tokens per request — roughly 393 pages of text.
Tool calling — AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: yes, Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch): yes. JSON-schema structured output — AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: yes, Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch): yes.
Only Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) accepts image input; AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is text-only for input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini can write up to 33K tokens (about 24,600 words) per response; Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) up to 210K (about 157,300 words).
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini was listed on 2026-09-23; Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) on 2025-12-02.
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-24. Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch): input price cut 50% ($0.15 → $0.07/1M), output price cut 50% ($0.15 → $0.07/1M) on 2026-09-10.
Aion 3.5 Mini is a multi-model roleplaying and storytelling system from AionLabs, built on the GLM family of models. It is the smaller, lower-cost sibling of Aion 3.5 and uses...
Full AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini specs →A balanced model in the Ministral 3 family, Ministral 3 8B is a powerful, efficient tiny language model with vision capabilities.
Full Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) specs →