Neither wins outright: inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) is the pick when cost matters at scale, Mistral: Mistral Small 4 when you need structured output (JSON schema).
| Spec | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inclusionai | Mistral AI |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0 | $0.15 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $0 | $0.60 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0 | $0.26 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 90% | 65% |
| Context window | 262K tokens (~393 pages) | 262K tokens (~393 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 47% | 47% |
| 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 | Yes | No |
| Listed since | 2026-09-04 | 2026-03-16 |
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) | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $0 | $23.25 | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) saves $23.25 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $0 | $24.00 | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) saves $24.00 |
| 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) | $0 | $25.20 | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) saves $25.20 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $0 | $15.60 | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) saves $15.60 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $0 | $8.10 | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) saves $8.10 |
| Capability | inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) | Mistral: Mistral Small 4 | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | — | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | ✓ 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 | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | ✓ Yes | — | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) is the pick when cost matters at scale, Mistral: Mistral Small 4 when you need structured output (JSON schema). In short: inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) when cost matters at scale, you need log-probabilities, you want to prototype at zero cost, you want the newer model; Mistral: Mistral Small 4 when you need structured output (JSON schema), you need image input, you generate long outputs in one go.
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) is cheaper: $0 vs $0.26 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 100% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $0 against $23.25.
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) costs $0 per 1M input tokens and $0 per 1M output tokens; Mistral: Mistral Small 4 costs $0.15 input and $0.60 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 — inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free): yes, Mistral: Mistral Small 4: yes. JSON-schema structured output — inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free): not advertised, Mistral: Mistral Small 4: yes.
Only Mistral: Mistral Small 4 accepts image input; inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) is text-only for input.
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) has a free variant (inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free). Free variants usually carry tighter rate limits.
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) can write up to 33K tokens (about 24,600 words) per response; Mistral: Mistral Small 4 up to 210K (about 157,300 words).
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash Sante (free) was listed on 2026-09-04; Mistral: Mistral Small 4 on 2026-03-16.
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