I root for Mistral and hope they'll be successful, perhaps I'll buy a subscription too once they're good enough for coding aid (perhaps they are now, didn't do any test with their models recently).

First of all, they release the models' weights, perdonally I don't consider any other option as viable (no OpenAI and definitely no Anthropic, thank you).

I especially like their Vibe Chat web offer, the allowed monthly usage with a free account is incredibly generous (still have to hit a limit) and the deep research feature (5/month for free) is also valuable.

I don't know anything about the alleged regulation maxxing problems, I don't perceive them as a problem for my causal/personal usage anyway.

> once they're good enough for coding aid

The gap has only been increasing, though. Devstral 2 was obviously not great compared to Claude/GPT but kind of acceptable if you were willing to compromise. There has been no real progress since then and frontier labs are massively ahead.