They didn't. Original price was maybe higher but they slashed it during preview and in fact it was lower by a bit ($0.68/M tokens) and $2.09 for output.
I've been using it for my personal project and it's still too expensive and very slow when thinking. I think we need one more generation from mistral and with maybe 50% of this already "slashed" price for this to be competitive (I use Opus 5.5 at work and it's still much better than this).
I just checked, seems you are right. They had roughly a week with the lower pricing, then increased it, now decrease it again. Very odd. My testing was with the higher pricing and looking at AA, theirs seems to have been too.
Token providers in aggregate work a bit like airlines so the end pricing should also work a bit like airlines; expect budget tokens, fast boarding tokens, window seat tokens, last minute tokens, miles for tokens, … and naturally prices fluctuating by the hour.
Not sure it’s particularly odd. Several models of late have launched with an introductory promotional pricing, only to later lock in the promotional pricing.
Too many models now to remember specifics - I believe deepseek v4 did this and one of the gpt models (5? 5.1? 6?) did this if I recall correctly. I’m also fairly confident Google has had a few promotional periods on launch of the model, I seem to remember them starting the trend.
Is it odd? I would guess that they're doing cost-plus pricing and the costs have been fluctuating with model revs.
Yeah I tried mistral 4 when it came out and it honestly felt like going back in time 6 months, suddenly my agents were making all kinds of mistakes that I had kind of forgotten agents regularly used to make
You get used to good AI performance fast. Going back to older, less capable AIs is a whiplash.