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Llama Guard 4 12B vs Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01

On provider list prices, Llama Guard 4 12B costs $0.20 per million input tokens against $0.10 for Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01: effectively level. Output is $0.20 against $0.30 (1.5x). On Allocate both bill at list plus the 7% transaction fee.

Llama Guard 4 12B Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01
LabMetamistralai
AccessOpen weightsOpen weights
Context window1M tokens32K tokens
List price, input$0.2 / M tokens$0.1 / M tokens
List price, output$0.2 / M tokens$0.3 / M tokens
Cached inputn/an/a
LicenseLlama communityApache 2.0
Fine-tunableYesYes

Specifications and provider list prices from the Allocate catalog, checked 2026-07-08. Billed price is list plus the 7% transaction fee.

What the numbers say

Take 1,000,000 requests a month at 1,200 input and 350 output tokens each. That workload costs $225 a month on Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01 and $310 on Llama Guard 4 12B at list: a gap of $85, or 1.4x.

Llama Guard 4 12B reads 1M tokens per request against 32K for Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01, 32.0x the window. That decides which one can take whole documents without splitting them.

Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01$0.10$0.30
Llama Guard 4 12B$0.20$0.20
InputOutput

Choose Llama Guard 4 12B for

  • The longer context window (1M vs 32K tokens)
Llama Guard 4 12B details

Choose Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01 for

  • The lower list price ($0.10 in / $0.30 out per M tokens)
  • Fine-tuning under a permissive license (Apache 2.0)
Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01 details

Common questions

Which is cheaper, Llama Guard 4 12B or Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01?

Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01, on this workload shape. At list prices it is $0.10/$0.30 per million tokens in and out against $0.20/$0.20 for Llama Guard 4 12B. Billed on Allocate: $0.11/$0.32 against $0.21/$0.21, list plus 7%.

Which has the bigger context window?

Llama Guard 4 12B: 1,048,576 tokens (1M) against 32,768 (32K) for Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01.

Can I fine-tune Llama Guard 4 12B or Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01?

Both publish open weights (Llama Guard 4 12B: Llama community; Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01: Apache 2.0), so both can be fine-tuned. On Allocate the trained weights stay inside your boundary and belong to you.

Related comparisons

Llama Guard 4 12B vs Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct ReferenceLlama Guard 4 12B vs Meta Llama 3.1 8BLlama Guard 4 12B vs Meta Llama 3 8B InstructLlama Guard 4 12B vs Mistral (7B) Instruct v0.1Llama Guard 4 12B vs Mistral (7B) Instruct v0.3Mistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01 vs Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct Reference

Run the numbers on your workload

LLM price comparisonAgent cost calculatorLlama Guard 4 12BMistral Small (24B) Instruct 25.01

Or don’t choose. On Allocate a route name is the contract: point yours at one model today, swap to the other tomorrow, and compare them on your live traffic with per-token metering.

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