Mistral AI · language model
Mixtral 8x22B Instruct: pricing, context and benchmarks
Mixtral 8x22B Instruct is Mistral AI's model released on April 17, 2024. It costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, with a 65.5K-token context window. No independent score has been published for it so far.
What you need to know about Mixtral 8x22B Instruct
Mistral AI, based in France, put Mixtral 8x22B Instruct online on April 17, 2024. It accepts text and files as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 65,536 tokens, larger than 12 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 52,428 tokens in one go.
Released more than 2 years ago, it belongs to a generation most vendors have since superseded.
Mixtral 8x22B Instruct pricing
On OpenRouter, Mixtral 8x22B Instruct costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $3 per million, more expensive than 77 % of paid models (3.9 times the median of $0.76).
A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.007. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $210 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.
Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.2 per million.
Performance and benchmarks
Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Mixtral 8x22B Instruct. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.
Features, privacy and local use
- It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
- It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
- Its knowledge stops at January 2024.
Its weights are open and downloadable from Hugging Face: you can run it on your own machines without sending your data to a third party.
Other Mistral AI models
| Model | Released | Avg. price | ECI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral Large 4 | Oct 6, 2026 | $2.07 | 150 |
| Mistral Medium 3.5 | Apr 30, 2026 | $3 | 141.4 |
| Mistral Small 4 | Mar 16, 2026 | $0.26 | — |
| Devstral 2 2512 | Dec 9, 2025 | $0.8 | — |
| Ministral 3 14B 2512 | Dec 2, 2025 | $0.2 | — |
| Ministral 3 8B 2512 | Dec 2, 2025 | $0.15 | — |
| Ministral 3 3B 2512 | Dec 2, 2025 | $0.1 | — |
| Mistral Large 3 2512 | Dec 1, 2025 | $0.75 | — |
Verdict
Computed score: 35/100, from public data (performance, price, context, features).
Strengths
- Open weights: self-hostable, your data stays with you.
- Agent-ready: tool calling and structured JSON output.
Limitations
- No independent score published: performance cannot be verified.
- Older generation, often replaced by a newer model from the same vendor.
Avoid if…
- you process large volumes on a tight budget.
Alternatives
Comparisons and tools
Learn more
Frequently asked questions
How much does Mixtral 8x22B Instruct cost?
$2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on OpenRouter (checked October 25, 2026). A task with 2,000 tokens read and 500 written costs $0.007.
How big is Mixtral 8x22B Instruct's context window?
65,536 tokens, roughly 49,000 words, with a maximum of 52,428 output tokens.
Can Mixtral 8x22B Instruct run locally?
Yes, its weights are published.
Is Mixtral 8x22B Instruct suitable for an AI agent?
Technically yes: it supports tool calling and structured outputs. Then check its cost for your volume.
What are the alternatives to Mixtral 8x22B Instruct?
The closest models on price and performance are Nano Banana 2.1, Magnum v4 72B, and GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k.
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Neutrality. No affiliate links. No vendor pays to be reviewed, rated or ranked. Reviews are directed by François Chollet, neutral and factual, and every data point is dated and sourced. How we score