Neither wins outright: Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) is the pick when cost matters at scale, Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking when you need reasoning / thinking mode.
| Spec | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral AI | Qwen |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.07 | $0.29 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $0.07 | $1.00 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.07 | $0.47 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 84% | 54% |
| Context window | 262K tokens (~393 pages) | 262K tokens (~393 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 48% | 48% |
| Max output per response | 210K tokens (~157,300 words) | 236K tokens (~176,900 words) |
| Input types | text, image | text, image |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | No |
| Listed since | 2025-12-02 | 2025-10-06 |
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) | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $7.13 | $41.75 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $34.63 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $9.75 | $44.80 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $35.05 |
| 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) | $9.90 | $46.80 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $36.90 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $6.45 | $29.20 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $22.75 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $3.82 | $15.50 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) saves $11.67 |
| Capability | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking | 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 | ✓ 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-10 | Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking | $0.29 | $1.00 |
| 2026-09-10 | Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) | $0.07 | $0.07 |
| 2026-08-06 | Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking | $0.20 | $2.40 |
| 2026-03-31 | Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking | $0.13 | $1.56 |
Neither wins outright: Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) is the pick when cost matters at scale, Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking when you need reasoning / thinking mode. In short: Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) when cost matters at scale, you need seed (reproducible sampling); Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking when you need reasoning / thinking mode.
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) is cheaper: $0.07 vs $0.47 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 84% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $7.13 against $41.75.
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) costs $0.07 per 1M input tokens and $0.07 per 1M output tokens; Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking costs $0.29 input and $1.00 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 — Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch): yes, Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch): yes, Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking: yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) can write up to 210K tokens (about 157,300 words) per response; Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking up to 236K (about 176,900 words).
Mistral: Ministral 3 8B 2512 (batch) was listed on 2025-12-02; Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking on 2025-10-06.
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. Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking: input price raised 31% ($0.20 → $0.29/1M), output price cut 58% ($2.40 → $1.00/1M) on 2026-10-10 (3 price changes since 2026-03-10).
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 →Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking is a multimodal model that unifies strong text generation with visual understanding for images and videos. Its Thinking variant enhances reasoning in STEM, math, and complex tasks. It excels...
Full Qwen: Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking specs →