Pretty far off the mark.

I've spent the last year building an AI product in a situation with really cut throat margins: I've post-trained every model Mistral has released in that time frame that was either open-weights or supported fine-tuning via Le Platforme (so I've gotten them at their absolute best case)

Mistral's models are not competitive anymore, and haven't been for most of that time. Gemma 27b has better world knowledge, Deepseek obsoleted their dense models, Gemini Flash is faster and their models are not even close to cost competitive with it (shocking claim otherwise tbh).

Mistral's platform is not fast (Mistral Medium is slower than Sonnet 4, which is just straight up insane!). Cerebras is fast, but there are both competitors offering similar speeds (Samba Nova and Groq), and other models that are faster on Cerebras (people really sleep on gpt-oss after the launch jitters)

You're inventing a snowman with your analogy: their models are just irrelevant, and that's informed by using everything from dots.llm to Minimax-Text to Jamba (which is really underestimated btw, and not Chinese if sinophobia has a grip on your org) to Seed-OSS, in production.

tl;dr: the only way to justify Mistral's models is in fact to reject the best solutions in any dimension that can be described as model performance.

If you're still using them and it really isn't for non-performance reasons, I assume you're overindexing on benchmarks or behind on the last year or so of open-weight progress and would recommend actually trying some other offerings.

And I have spent the last year building multiple ones.

While I can't claim to have tested everything, especially as we aren't going to change our stack every single week as something releases, I can speak for my recent knowledge of comparing Mistral small and Medium (their summer releases) with offerings from Google, OAI and Anthropic.

For our use cases, where little thinking is required and its mostly about gathering and transforming data Mistral offered the lowest cost per $. There is no single cloud out there that could compete on the cost per token or speed, bar Gemini flash.

We'll re evaluate and test in the future, but we're very satisfied in a way that only Gemini flash did for us before.

Plus, they are from EU and we're very glad to sustain an European business, we'll only consider alternatives if we need them or the current offering isn't competitive anymore, that's still not the case.