Claude 4 Opus vs Mistral Medium 3.5 — Pricing Comparison 2026

Requests per Day

Days per Month

Anthropic

Claude 4 Opus (Retired)

$0.00

per month

Input cost

Output cost

Cost per request

Requests/month

Mistral AI

Mistral Medium 3.5

$0.00

per month

Input cost

Output cost

Cost per request

Requests/month

Which Model for Which Use Case?

Claude 4 Opus Migration

With Claude 4 Opus deprecating June 15, Mistral Medium 3.5 offers a cost-effective alternative — 90% cheaper on both input and output. Same quality tier for most tasks.

Best value migration: Mistral Medium 3.5 (90% cheaper)

Code Generation & Instruction Following

Mistral Medium 3.5 excels at code generation, instruction following, and multilingual tasks — the same use cases where Claude 4 Opus was strong. 128K context handles most workloads.

Code & instructions: Mistral Medium 3.5 ($1.50/$7.50)

Direct Anthropic Successor

If you need Anthropic's ecosystem and style, Claude Opus 4.8 ($5/$25) is the direct successor — 67% cheaper than Claude 4 Opus with 5x more context (1M tokens).

Direct successor: Claude Opus 4.8 ($5/$25) | Budget mid-tier: Mistral Medium 3.5 ($1.50/$7.50)

Maximum Cost Savings

For workloads where quality is important but budget matters, Mistral Medium 3.5 at $1.50/$7.50 is 90% cheaper than Claude 4 Opus. For even deeper savings, consider DeepSeek V4 Pro ($0.44/$0.87) — 97% cheaper with 1M context.

Premium savings: Mistral Medium 3.5 (90% cheaper) | Budget option: DeepSeek V4 Pro (97% cheaper)

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Mistral Medium 3.5 cheaper than Claude 4 Opus?

Yes, dramatically. Claude 4 Opus costs $15.00/M input and $75.00/M output. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.50/M input and $7.50/M output. Mistral Medium 3.5 is 90% cheaper on both input and output. For a typical workload of 1M input + 500K output tokens/month, Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $5.25 vs Claude 4 Opus's $52.50 — saving you $47.25/month (90%).

How does Mistral Medium 3.5 quality compare to Claude 4 Opus?

Claude 4 Opus was Anthropic's flagship model with excellent reasoning and coding capabilities, but it was retired on June 15, 2026. Mistral Medium 3.5 from Mistral AI is a strong mid-tier competitor with a 128K token context window. Mistral Medium 3.5 excels at code generation, instruction following, and multilingual tasks. For Opus-level quality at a lower price, Mistral Medium 3.5 offers excellent value.

What happened when Claude 4 Opus was retired on June 15?

Since June 15, 2026, Claude 4 Opus API calls return 410 Gone errors. You must migrate to a replacement model. Options: (1) Mistral Medium 3.5 ($1.50/$7.50) — 90% cheaper, 128K context, strong mid-tier. (2) Claude Opus 4.8 ($5/$25) — direct Anthropic successor, 67% cheaper with 5x more context. (3) GPT-5 ($1.25/$10) — 92% cheaper, 272K context. (4) DeepSeek V4 Pro ($0.44/$0.87) — budget open source with 1M context.

Can Mistral Medium 3.5 handle the same tasks as Claude 4 Opus?

Yes, for most tasks. Mistral Medium 3.5 handles code generation, instruction following, document analysis, and multilingual tasks that previously required Claude 4 Opus. Mistral Medium 3.5's 128K context handles most document lengths. For tasks needing 200K+ context or Anthropic's specific style, consider Claude Opus 4.8 ($5/$25) or GPT-5 ($1.25/$10) with 272K context.