Kimi K3 Launch Recap: What Moonshot Shipped on July 16
Everything confirmed about the Kimi K3 release: 2.8T parameters, 1M context, $3/$15 pricing, Elo 1547, and the July 27 open-weights promise.
· news
Kimi K3 token pricing, calculators & API guides — independent and verified
Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model, released July 16, 2026. The API costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, with a 1M-token context window. This site turns those numbers into decisions: count your tokens, forecast your bill, compare alternatives.
Last verified: · source
Tools
Token Calculator
Paste text, get an exact Kimi token count plus input/output cost — runs the real tokenizer in your browser.
Cost Calculator
Model a real workload — coding agent, RAG bot, batch research — into a monthly Kimi K3 API bill with cache savings.
Context Window
What actually fits in 1M tokens? Pages, codebases and transcripts translated into concrete numbers.
Kimi K3 pricing at a glance
| Model | Input / 1M tokens | Output / 1M tokens | Context | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K3 | $3.00 | $15.00 | 1,048.576K | open-weight |
| Kimi K2.6 | $0.95 | $4.00 | 262.144K | open-weight |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro | $1.10* | $4.40* | 262.144K | open-weight |
| GPT-5.5 | $2.50* | $20.00* | 400K | proprietary |
| Claude Sonnet | $3.00* | $15.00* | 1,000K | proprietary |
* listed price at time of verification; check the linked source for the vendor's current rate.
Full breakdown, cache math and channel comparison on the pricing page.
Latest
Kimi K3 Hardware Requirements: The Honest Pre-Release Math
What will it take to run Kimi K3's 2.8T MoE locally? Storage per quantization level, why MoE sparsity doesn't cut memory, and realistic setups.
· local
Kimi K3 Context Caching: How the Discount Actually Works
Kimi K3 prompt caching explained: what gets cached, the 60-80% effective savings reports, worked examples, and how to structure prompts for hits.
· api, pricing
How to Use Kimi K3 for Free: Every Real Option in 2026
Legit ways to use Kimi K3 free: kimi.com's free tier, router trials and what they limit — plus what 'free' actually costs in quotas and privacy.
· guide
Frequently asked questions
How much does Kimi K3 cost per token?
Kimi K3 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens on the official Moonshot API (verified July 21, 2026). Cached input is discounted; the official cached rate has not been published yet.
Is Kimi K3 open source?
Kimi K3 is announced as an open-weight model. Moonshot AI has promised to release the weights by July 27, 2026. Until then it is available through the Kimi app, kimi.com and the API.
What is Kimi K3's context window?
Kimi K3 supports a 1,048,576-token (1M) context window with text and image input, per the model listing on OpenRouter and Moonshot's platform documentation.