Getting Your API Keys
How to get a Mistral API key
EU-hosted content generation, a free tier to try it on, and what the free tier costs you in rate limits.
What a Mistral key powers in Landio
Mistral's models write text: captions, hooks, post copy and inbox replies. No images or video.
The usual reason to choose it is where it runs. Mistral is a French company serving from EU infrastructure, which is the straightforward answer when a client or a policy requires that content processing stays in the EU.
Before you start
Keys are issued from the Mistral console. Creating an account needs a phone number for verification — there's no way around that step.
Mistral offers a free tier you can generate on before paying anything. It's genuinely usable for trying the vendor out, but its rate limits are low enough that a batch of scheduled posts can hit them. Treat it as an evaluation tier, not a production one.
Creating the key
Console sign-up, phone verification, then the key page.
Go to console.mistral.ai and create an account or sign in.
Screenshot: The Mistral console home page
Verify your phone number when prompted. Keys can't be created until this is done.
Screenshot: The Mistral phone number verification step
Open API Keys in the sidebar and choose Create new key. Name it after where it will be used, and set an expiry if you want one — Mistral is one of the few vendors here that offers expiring keys.
Screenshot: The Mistral API keys page with the create key dialog and optional expiry field
Copy the key — it's shown only once.
Screenshot: The newly created Mistral API key displayed with a copy button
Moving off the free tier
Under Billing, add a payment method to move to the paid tier. Rate limits rise substantially, and you're billed per token rather than cut off.
If you set an expiry on your key, put the date somewhere you'll see it. An expired key fails exactly like a revoked one, and the cause isn't obvious from the error.
Adding the key to Landio
Open AI Providers from the sidebar, find Mistral in the vendor list, paste the key, and save. Mistral then becomes a choice for content generation.
Keys are encrypted at rest and write-only — after saving, the page only tells you that a key exists, never what it is. That also means there's no way to read a key back out of us later, so keep the copy you saved at the vendor.
Adding a key doesn't unlock a feature; it changes who bills you for it. Every plan already includes an AI allowance, so drafting works before you do any of this. With your own key, that usage bills from Mistral at their rates instead of counting against the allowance.
You can add more than one key per vendor. Landio will either spread calls across them or treat the extras as failover spares, depending on how you configure that vendor — useful when one key is a paid account and the rest are backups.
If something goes wrong
Rate-limit errors during a batch almost always mean you're still on the free tier. Adding a payment method is the fix.
An authentication error on a key that worked last month is worth checking against its expiry date before assuming anything is broken.
Frequently asked questions
Is Mistral actually better for GDPR?
It's a French company processing in the EU, which removes the transfer question that a US vendor raises. That's a meaningful part of the answer, not the whole of it — your obligations depend on what you're sending and what you've told your clients. It's the easiest vendor here to defend on that point, and still worth confirming against their current DPA.
Which Mistral model should I use?
Mistral Large for anything you care about, Small for high-volume drafting. Medium sits between them and is a reasonable default if you'd rather not think about it.
Can I run a whole content schedule on the free tier?
Not reliably. The limits are per-second and per-month, and a batch of scheduled generations is exactly the shape of traffic that trips them. Use it to decide whether you like the output, then add a card.
Is it safe to paste an API key into a third-party app?
Keys are encrypted before storage and never displayed again after you save them. That said, the honest general answer is: give any third party the narrowest key you can, and keep the ability to revoke it. Where a vendor supports scoped or restricted keys, use one limited to the models Landio actually calls, and rotate it from the vendor's console if you ever stop using us.
This walkthrough was last checked against the provider's live console on . Providers redesign their dashboards without notice — if what you see doesn't match, the button names have probably moved rather than the process changing.
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