Kimi K2.6: what it costs to run
The price Moonshot AI lists for Kimi K2.6, what a support reply, a document summary and an agent task cost at it, and where that puts it among 37 models.
US dollars per million tokens, standard rate, shortest context band.
- 1,000 support replies
- $4.45
- Cached input
- $0.16
- Context window
- 262,144 tokens
- Released
- Apr 2026
- Weights
- Open
From Moonshot AI’s own pages, 22 September 2026.
Kimi K2.6 costs $0.95 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens on Moonshot AI’s own API, and $0.16 for cached input. At those prices 1,000 support replies cost $4.45, the 15th cheapest of 33 priced models on our list.
What a job costs
Three jobs, 1,000 runs of each, at the list price above, and where each puts Kimi K2.6 among the 33 models with a list price.
| Job | 1,000 runs | Among 33 |
|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $4.45 | 15th cheapest |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $27.75 | 15th cheapest |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $32.70 | 15th cheapest |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are Moonshot AI’s. All three jobs stay under 200,000 tokens a request, below every long-context surcharge on the list.
Kimi K2.6 on real small-business tasks
What the AIGROW benchmark measured when Kimi K2.6 was given 20 office tasks, each marked pass or fail by fixed checks.
- Success rate
- 75% of 20 runs passed (95% interval 53 to 89%), 23rd of 36 models.
- Cost per 1,000 passes
- $11.68, failed runs included.
- Answer time
- 28 s median, 73 s at the 90th percentile.
- Strongest and weakest
- Bookkeeping (100% passed) and review replies (0%).
The small print
What the base rate above leaves out, copied from the maker’s pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
Input price is the cache-miss rate; cache hit $0.16. Previous-generation model kept as the cheaper option. Open weights on Hugging Face (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6). Changelog gives the month only.
Kimi K2.6 against the models it is weighed with
Each comparison puts both list prices side by side and costs the same three jobs on each.
- vs GPT-5.6 Terra
- Kimi's cheaper previous flagship against OpenAI's mid tier at under half the price.
Other Moonshot AI models
| Model | Input | Output | Context | 1,000 replies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K3Moonshot AI · open weights | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1.05M | $15.00 |
Where the price comes from
- Moonshot AI
- platform.kimi.ai/docs/pricing/chat
Read on 22 September 2026. Each price is the standard rate for the shortest context band, with no batch or priority discount; long-context surcharges, batch rates and promotions are in each model’s small print. No price was taken from a reseller.
Pay a quarter of list price
AIGROW API credit is metered at the makers’ list prices, and $25 buys $100 of usage. The credit page lists the models it covers; ask about any other before buying.
Prices checked 22 September 2026