Kimi is an AI assistant made by Moonshot AI, a company based in Beijing. It became famous for very long context, strong coding and agent features at a low price. Kimi is available on the web at kimi.com, in mobile apps and through an API for developers.
Kimi K3 and K3.1 Pro
Kimi K3 was released in July 2026. It is a very large mixture-of-experts model with about 2.8 trillion parameters and a context window of about one million tokens. Moonshot published its weights under a custom license, so companies can run it on their own servers, with revenue-sharing terms for very large providers.
Kimi K3.1 Pro followed on October 23, 2026. It is aimed at coding, financial research and 3D modeling, and it is cheaper than K3 through the API. A faster Highspeed version costs about twice as much.
Kimi API prices
| Model | Input, per 1M tokens | Cached input | Output, per 1M tokens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K3.1 Pro | $2 | $0.20 | $10 |
| Kimi K3 | $3 | $0.30 | $15 |
Batch requests for K3 and K3.1 Pro cost 60% of the standard price. The older K2 models were closed to new accounts on October 31, 2026, and Moonshot plans to retire them by the end of December.
Kimi app plans
The Kimi app has a free tier and four paid membership levels. They start at about $19 per month, or about $15 per month billed yearly, and go up to about $199 per month for the highest tier. Higher tiers give more agent credits, the full context window, the Highspeed model and more Kimi Code usage. API billing is separate from the app membership.
Main features
- Agent swarm: Kimi can split a big task between many sub-agents working in parallel.
- Kimi Code: a command-line coding agent, similar to Claude Code or Codex.
- Documents, spreadsheets, slides and deep research inside the app.
Things to keep in mind
Kimi is strong and cheap, but it is a Chinese service, so check its privacy terms before you upload client data. In September 2026 Anthropic publicly accused Moonshot of training on Claude outputs. For sensitive work, many companies prefer to run the open weights on their own servers.
Prices and dates in this article were checked on November 10, 2026. AI companies change them often, so always confirm on the official pricing page before you buy.
Frequently asked questions
Is Kimi AI free?
Yes, there is a free tier with basic chat and limited use of K3.1 Pro. Paid memberships start at about $19 per month.
Is Kimi open source?
Kimi K3’s weights are published under a custom license with commercial conditions. Older K2 models used a modified MIT license.
Is Kimi better than ChatGPT?
It depends on the task. Kimi is very competitive for coding and long documents at a lower API price, while ChatGPT has more features, better integrations and a larger ecosystem.
Read next
- DeepSeek Review 2026: V4 Pro, V4.1 Flash and the Cheapest AI API Prices
- Chinese AI Models in 2026: Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen and GLM Compared
- Open-Weight AI Models in 2026: DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral and Others
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