Kimi

The details

Current flagship

Kimi K3, released July 2026: a mixture-of-experts model with about 2.8 trillion total parameters and roughly 104 billion active per token.

Context window

Up to 1 million tokens. That is the reason to try it when you have long PDFs, large notes, or a codebase that makes smaller chatbots start politely losing the plot.

What it is good at

Long-document research, coding help, agent-style browsing and automation tasks, and working with text plus images in the same conversation.

How to try it

Start at kimi.com for the consumer chatbot, or use platform.kimi.ai for the API. Developers can call the Kimi K3 model through an OpenAI-compatible SDK path.

API pricing

Launch pricing was reported at about $0.30 per million cached input tokens, $3 per million fresh input tokens, and $15 per million output tokens. Check Moonshot's live pricing before budgeting anything serious.

Open weights

Moonshot has published full Kimi K3 weights on Hugging Face under the Kimi K3 License. Open weights do not mean laptop-friendly: this is a very large model, not a weekend download for a normal home setup.

Plans

Free chat on kimi.com and the apps. Paid memberships start at about US$19 a month and include Kimi Code, its coding agent; bigger plans (about US$39, US$99 and US$199) add more usage and the full K3. Kimi has said chat and Kimi Code will move to separate plans, so check the live price before paying. Honest comparison: the entry plan saves only about a dollar a month against Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus. The real savings are pay-as-you-go: Kimi's coding models cost less per task than the top US models.

Data location note

Moonshot AI is a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing. Its privacy policy says your chats may be used to improve its models, and we found no opt-out. We can't guarantee your privacy here (no big AI company can fully guarantee it), so keep personal, financial and work-confidential material out.

Privacy snapshot