GPT-3.5 Turbo vs Pixtral 12B
Performance benchmarks + pricing comparison — updated April 2026
GPT-3.5 Turbo
OpenAIBudget model for simple tasks. Being phased out but still widely used.
| Input | $0.500/M |
| Output | $1.50/M |
| Context | 16K tokens |
| Best For | Simple chatbots, basic text generation |
| Benchmark | 40/100 |
Pixtral 12B
MistralMistral's lightweight vision-language model. Affordable image understanding with good performance.
| Input | $0.150/M |
| Output | $0.150/M |
| Context | 32K tokens |
| Best For | Image understanding, visual QA, cost-efficient multimodal apps |
Cost Comparison by Scenario
Estimated cost per project with 30% cache hit rate. Actual costs may vary based on usage patterns.
| Scenario | GPT-3.5 Turbo | Pixtral 12B | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small Script (1K lines) | $0.06 | <$0.01 | Pixtral 12B saves $0.05 (84%) |
| Medium Feature (10K lines) | $0.48 | $0.08 | Pixtral 12B saves $0.39 (83%) |
| Large Project (50K lines) | $2.38 | $0.41 | Pixtral 12B saves $1.96 (83%) |
| Code Review (5K lines) | $0.13 | $0.03 | Pixtral 12B saves $0.10 (76%) |
Verdict
Pixtral 12B wins on both price and performance — $0.150/M input with a benchmark score of N/A/100.
For most developers, this is the clear choice between these two models.
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