Google Cloud Model Armor vs Mistral Moderation API

Google Cloud Model Armor

2 million free tokens a month, then $0.10 per million. OAuth only, and a template must exist in the same location as the endpoint before the first call.

Mistral Moderation API

Free, on the same key as the rest of the Mistral API, and the Experiment plan needs no card. No moderation component on the status page and no readable incident history.

Google Cloud Model Armor

1. Create one template per location you call from. A template in us-central1 doesn't answer on the europe-west2 endpoint
2. Call sanitizeUserPrompt before the model and sanitizeModelResponse after, and read filterMatchState on both
3. Treat EXECUTION_SKIPPED as unchecked, not clean. It means the input went over the filter's 65,536-token cap
4. Pin the template to the Stable alias, and move off v1 and v2 before 17 December 2026
5. Retry 500, 502, 503 and 504 with truncated exponential backoff, and keep fan-out under the 1,200 queries a minute shared by the project

Mistral Moderation API

1. Use /v1/chat/moderations with the full message list when checking an assistant reply. The raw endpoint has no context
2. Read category_scores and set your own threshold per category. The booleans use Mistral's cut-offs
3. Pin mistral-moderation-2603. The 2411 model was retired on 31 March 2026
4. Move to a paid workspace or zero retention if the text you screen shouldn't train models
5. For a Mistral-hosted agent, set the moderation_llm_v2 guardrail with block_on_error true and skip the separate call