Kimi K3: what it costs to run
The price Moonshot AI lists for Kimi K3, 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
- $15.00
- Cached input
- $0.30
- Context window
- 1,048,576 tokens
- Released
- Jul 2026
- Weights
- Open
From Moonshot AI’s own pages, 22 September 2026.
Kimi K3 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens on Moonshot AI’s own API, and $0.30 for cached input. At those prices 1,000 support replies cost $15.00, the 7th most expensive 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 K3 among the 33 models with a list price.
| Job | 1,000 runs | Among 33 |
|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $15.00 | 7th most expensive |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $90.00 | 7th most expensive |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $96.00 | 9th most expensive |
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 K3 on real small-business tasks
What the AIGROW benchmark measured when Kimi K3 was given 20 office tasks, each marked pass or fail by fixed checks.
- Success rate
- 95% of 20 runs passed (95% interval 76 to 99%), 1st of 36 models.
- Cost per 1,000 passes
- $18.44, failed runs included.
- Answer time
- 15 s median, 78 s at the 90th percentile.
- Strongest and weakest
- Appointment scheduling (100% passed) and product descriptions (0%).
The small print
What the base rate above leaves out, copied from the maker’s pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
Cache write $3 (5 min TTL) or $6 (1 h TTL). Open weights on Hugging Face (moonshotai/Kimi-K3). Changelog gives the month only.
Kimi K3 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 Claude Opus 5
- Kimi K3 is marketed for long-horizon coding and knowledge work, the same ground as Opus.
- vs GLM-5.3
- Open-weight frontier models released within two months of each other, with Kimi costing two to three times as much.
Other Moonshot AI models
| Model | Input | Output | Context | 1,000 replies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K2.6Moonshot AI · open weights | $0.95 | $4.00 | 262K | $4.45 |
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.
Run Kimi K3 for a quarter of its list price
AIGROW API credit covers Kimi K3 and is metered at the list price above: $25 buys $100 of usage.
Prices checked 22 September 2026