verifier.org

Codestral

downloadable, and forbidden in production — the licence is a flat non-commercial bar, not a threshold.

research use only#research#evaluation#prototypes-that-will-nev

the most restrictive licence in this ranking by a distance, on a model whose current iteration may not have open weights at all.

the mistral ai non-production licence bars commercial and production use outright for the open-weight release — research and testing purposes only. that is stricter than every threshold-based licence here: devstral's $20m revenue cliff, kimi k3's scale gates and marker's funding cap all permit shipping until you get large. this permits none.

the framing compounds it. mistral's launch page emphasises downloading from hugging face without leading with the prohibition, and the same company ships devstral small under plain apache 2.0 and states devstral 2's revenue cap explicitly. the candour is inconsistent within one vendor's own product line.

the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.

category
coding llms
pricing
research use only
website
mistral.ai
our verdict

the most restrictive licence in this ranking by a distance, on a model whose current iteration may not have open weights at all.

we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.

more coding llms

OpenCoder

fully open code model with training data and pipeline released

#fully-open#reproducible

Magicoder

small code models trained on oss-derived synthetic instructions

#research#small

Qwen3-Coder

we checked thisfree (apache 2.0)

apache 2.0 confirmed in the licence text, a million tokens of context, and now a version small enough to actually run.

#repository-scale-agentic#the-licence-both-need-to

DeepSeek Coder

we checked thisfree (mit)

the brand is now an api alias — and the models behind it went from a restrictive weights licence to plain mit.

#frontier-tier-coding-whe