# Timestral by Mistral

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Timestral by Mistral and 11 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-weight time-series forecasting models that people find strong on benchmarks and can be fine-tuned on their own data. Main caveat: a restrictive license requires a commercial agreement above $20M monthly revenue.

## Why people recommend it

- Free, open-weight models (3 comments): "they let you build a $200M yearly revenue company on top of it for free, seems quite generous" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159995)) "It runs GPUless and is open source, so you're just paying the normal compute cost." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187021)) "Timestral is free and open weights." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152255))
- Strong forecasting and benchmark results (3 comments): "are best-in-class for each model size, and are best-in-class overall based on the public benchmarks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114582)) "this is a great time series forecasting model, we are migrating to this in our pod" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50153871)) "get apparently quite good results (and fine-tune on my data, it seems)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151172))
- Can fine-tune on own data (2 comments): "this might be very good for feature selection to refine a much more specialized model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151435)) "get apparently quite good results (and fine-tune on my data, it seems)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151172))

## What people warn about

- Restrictive license above revenue threshold (6 comments): "unfortunate about the restrictive license" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152944)) "The Mistral model has a restrictive license, where you need a specific commercial agreement to use it if you make more than 20M$ revenue/month." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151727)) "it has a "Modified" MIT, which requires you to buy from Mistral if your global business makes more than $20m a month." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152509))
- Fails to beat simple baselines (3 comments): "you're going to get completely beaten by a comparatively simple system that knows the time of day" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151552)) "It did not beat our AutoARIMA baselines, they are pretty noisy series though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50164262)) "These are essentially numerology models." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151252))
- Unclear real-world use cases (2 comments): "I like that it's something different but I'm struggling to think of a way to use this." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50158203)) "Real-world usability is very limited, which is probably the reason why the blog post features an imaginary customer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151235))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Timestral by Mistral", https://hackerapproved.com/p/timestral/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).