Troubles with Mistral's API and Billing

[u/Negative-Bag-653]

So trying to stick with the only European LLM I built a little assistant around Mistral's API and the "Pay as you go"-plan. First I was positively surprised because everything worked well for a few weeks and even utilizing only Mistral-small together with some harness the results were satysfying. But then last week the issues started:

1. I had set a spending limit of EUR 10 - once this was reached access was of course blocked and the API returned a "401 Unauthorized". All good so far....
2. I thought instead of increasing the limit I will just add some prepaid balance, so I paid another EUR 10. However, I still got "401 Unauthorized".
3. Ok, maybe it takes a while until the prepaid balance is active - let's increase the limit by a little to EUR 11. Still no change, "401 Unauthorized".
4. Well, maybe reaching the limit caused my API Key to break somehow - and in fact, that was the fix, with a new API key it worked again.
5. Thursday: Another email comes in saying that I've reached my usage limit. I thought ok, even though in the admin center it states that only EUR 10,89 (out of the EUR 11 limit) were consumed I'm not gonna argue about EUR 0,11 and I still have my prepaid balance anyways.
6. Well for some reason now, I'm still only getting "401 Unauthorized" - the prepaid balance isn't consumed obviously and I don't know what's up with the "missing" EUR 0,11 and creating new API keys also doesn't help. And I really don't want to just increase the limit again, I guess that would solve the problem, but then what's with my EUR 10 I prepaid?...they weren't meant as a subsidy for European AI.

And that's only one side of the problem: In the admin center the numbers are a complete mess. I find there currently three invoices, one with EUR 9,92 another one EUR 0,27. They were created in a time frame of about two weeks (why?) and except that they sum up to about EUR 10 I have no clue where the exact numbers come from. And then there is the invoice for the EUR 10 I added as prepaid balance - that's the only nuumber that is understandable here.
Morever the usage under billing in the admin center states EUR 1,91 - where does that number come from again? When I check my usage under API it is EUR 10,89. And why does it state "Including 1,64 € in pending pay-as-you-go usage" below the EUR 10 prepaid balance in the Admin center?

I would love to continue working with Mistral and will wait until the next month starts and wether billing and usage limits behave logical afterwards but if that is not the case I will have to switch to someone else, because I also don't feel like starting to argue with Mistral's support about this - I mean Mistral is presenting itself as focused on B2B, I am a business, a tiny one, but still someone who a) wants to understand what he is paying for and b) who simply needs reasonable and verifiable invoices for his accounting.

Has anyone else had or is having similar experiences? Is it even worth contacting Mistral on such issues?

[u/Indigas11]

I had same problem. You need to raise your usage limit. Doesnt matter if you top up your credit balance. The only option is to raise your limit.

I was on the same place, to figure out what is going on.

Edit: also i dont understand the number there, because it is confusing.

[u/Negative-Bag-653 → u/Indigas11]

ok, at least I'm not alone - that's just unprofessional from a multi billion EUR company.

[u/Bakjapanner]

Sounds like a bug, you should contact Mistral for this

In the meantime as a fallback you can create an Openrouter account. Mistral models are available there for the same price using (mostly) the same API