Ministral 3 3B 2512: pricing, context and performance

Overview

Released on December 2, 2025, Ministral 3 3B 2512 is one of the 11 Mistral AI models tracked on this site. It is an open-weight model: you can host it yourself on infrastructure you control, and 8 API providers listed on models.dev also offer it. It has no declared reasoning mode: it answers directly, without an extra billed thinking step. That makes it 10 months old as of October 22, 2026.

We file it under open-weight models (68 models in this category on the site).

How much does Ministral 3 3B 2512 cost?

Ministral 3 3B 2512 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.10 per million output tokens (median of 8 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.002, or $2.2 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is 10 times cheaper than the median output price of open-weight models ($1).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

Benchmark results

Epoch AI publishes a single result for Ministral 3 3B 2512 on our basket's benchmarks: too few to compute a reliable capability index.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 25.3% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%

Technical specifications

Its context window reaches 131,072 tokens, roughly 197 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a medium-length document. A single answer can run to 104,857 tokens.

It accepts as input: text and image.

It can call tools (functions, APIs) and return structured JSON output, which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

The weights are published on Hugging Face (mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512). See also our list of open-source models.

Who is it for?

Given its category, Ministral 3 3B 2512 is mainly aimed at projects where you want control over your data or hosting, or want to adapt the model to your field.

Its very low cost (under half a cent for our sample task) means it can be called thousands of times a day.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Comparable models

In the same category, the models closest to Ministral 3 3B 2512 are:

• DeepSeek R1 0528 Qwen3 8B (DeepSeek, $0.09 per million output tokens)
• Granite 4.0 Micro (IBM (Granite), $0.11 per million output tokens)
• LFM2-24B-A2B (Liquid AI, $0.12 per million output tokens)
• Mistral Small 3 (Mistral AI, $0.08 per million output tokens)