u/porzione

Does the Pro plan make any sense for text-only API use? I mostly need Kimi 2.6, and sometimes GLM, MiMo, Qwen, etc made in China stuff. Maybe I misunderstood Pro features, but it seems like simply topping up my token balance would be enough for me, since I can buy more tokens for $18 than I would get with the plan.

I don't do anything heavy, but OpenRouter often rate-limits me specifically for Kimi's tool calls. I did a quick smoke test and the Venice API works flawlessly. OR just rate-limited me again, even though I had pinned Venice as the provider, so I decided to try it directly.

Mistral promotes Small 4 (2603) as a coding, blah-blah model with function calling, while at the same time enforcing a rate limit 1.67 RPS for my org - which makes agentic calls nearly impossible. Nobody does this to paying for API customers (Scale plan).

Agent needs multiple fast turns to do even simple things: find a file, shell command, call an MCP tool, validate result, etc. And Small 4 fails on basically any such task with Rate limit exceeded / 429. They could at least add a "Request limit increase" button instead of "To ensure the highest level of service quality, our API enforces limitations". Medium 3.5 has better rate limits, but it times out too often for agentic use and is significantly more expensive. Large 2512, the only more or less strong model for competitive price, also hits the rate limit. This is absolutely not "highest level of service quality".

And then you wonder why enthusiasts and companies are switching to Chinese models, because you can basically ddos Deepseek API from multiple threads. I'm sure enterprise can get higher Mistral rate limits, but for the average user it's easier to switch providers than to pay more for average models and still deal with restrictive limits.