< h 2 >Your AI Assistant is Exp ensive and Slow </ h 2 >< p >Last Wednesday at 11 PM , I was staring blank ly at my bill in the study — my monthly API costs had exceeded $ 200 again . I only use it to write customer emails and run batch copy writing , so how is it this expensive ? If you 're also using AI for daily content , you definitely know this pain .</ p >< h 2 > What is Mist ral Medium 3 . 5 </ h 2 >< p >M ist ral is a French AI company , and Medium 3 . 5 is their newly released mid -tier model . In plain terms : the performance is about on par with Claude Son net , but the price is less than half . I got stuck here too —I assumed cheap models must be useless , but after testing , it ’s completely sufficient for writing Chinese emails and making customer summaries . My friend Xia ochen , who does cross -border e -commerce in Hang zhou , used this model last Friday afternoon to run batch product descriptions . 200 items only cost $ 0 . 3 , saving 70 % compared to G PT - 4 o .</ p >< h 2 >Your Rep lication Cost Today </ h 2 >< p > Money : Input is about $ 0 . 4 per million tokens ( about 3 R MB ), output is about $ 2 per million tokens ( about 15 R MB ). Time : About 30 minutes from registration to getting it running . Technical barrier : You need to register a Mist ral account and get a password string called an " API key " ( just a string of letters and numbers , copy and paste it ), and put it into your tool . First step : Open mist ral .ai , click " Sign up " in the upper right corner , and register with your email .</ p >< h 2 > Advice by Stage </ h 2 >< p >If you are just starting out and still trying various tools for free , it ’s okay not to try this now ; getting the business running is more important . If you have 1 - 2 clients and are using AI to write copy or reply to emails , I 'd suggest taking a small task to test it — like having Medium 3 . 5 write three customer follow -up emails , and compare it with the model you are currently using to see how much the effect differs . If you are scaling up and API costs are already making your wallet hurt , I 'd seriously suggest migrating batch tasks ( summ aries , translations , simple copy writing ) to this model , and leaving the expensive models for jobs that require deep reasoning .</ p >