Is Mistral Large 4 really free to run?

The weights are coming for free. The hardware to use them is a different story.

There are two ways in. The first is the paid API. During the preview it costs about $0.68 per million input tokens and $2.09 per million output tokens, which is a promotional half price. The full list price will be $1.36 and $4.18.

The second is to download it. Mistral says the open weights arrive by the end of October, with 27 October the date being talked about. Notice the fine print: a custom licence, not the permissive Apache style. Read it before you bet a business on it.

Free to download means free to run, right?

Not even close. With about 1.05 trillion parameters, even at a compact 8-bit precision you are looking at roughly a terabyte of memory just to hold the weights, before you serve a single user. That is multi-GPU server territory, not a laptop and not a gaming PC.

And the cheap-looking token price can fool you. One independent review notes that the low price per token turns into only a middling cost per task. Cheap on the label, ordinary on the invoice.