Blog

Kimi K3: specs, benchmarks, and our day-one plan to serve it

Jul 22, 2026 - Last update: Jul 28, 2026

Kimi K3 is Moonshot AI’s new flagship, announced on July 16 after a leaked promotion page on Moonshot’s own platform tipped the release a day early. The headline is simple: on the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scores 57 — above Claude Opus 4.8 (56), making it the first open-weight model to outscore a Claude Opus-class model on that index.

And to answer the question this blog exists to answer: yes, we will serve it. We have already secured the capacity to run a model of this size. K3 goes live on CheapestInference the moment two things are true: the weights are actually published, and the license terms permit commercial serving. Nothing else is in the way.

Update — July 2026: Kimi K3 is now live. The weights shipped on schedule (July 27), and K3 is served in the new Flagship Pool with unlimited usage at a flat monthly price — very limited seats. How to use the Kimi K3 API → · Subscribe →

July 28: with Claude Opus 5 (61) and GPT-5.6 Sol (59) landing the same month, K3’s 57 puts the open-vs-closed gap at 4 index points — per Artificial Analysis, the narrowest since the GLM-5 release in February. Only two labs score higher. Our Pareto Frontier report now charts K3 — straight onto the frontier.

What Moonshot announced


Architecture	Mixture-of-Experts, ~2.8T total parameters
Context window	1M tokens
Input	Text, image, and video
Variants at launch	K3 Max (chat and agent tasks) · K3 Swarm Max (large-scale parallel processing)
Available today	Moonshot’s API, Kimi Code, and the Kimi app
Open weights	Published July 27, 2026 — Hugging Face, Kimi K3 License
List price (API)	$3 input / $15 output per 1M tokens

Coverage from the launch day: TechCrunch on the Opus gap closing, Fortune on Chinese AI entering Fable-level territory, and Simon Willison’s notes for a practitioner’s first look.

When is the Kimi K3 release date?

K3 was announced on July 16, 2026, usable from day one through Moonshot’s own API, Kimi Code, and the Kimi app. The open weights were published on July 27, 2026, on schedule, on Hugging Face under Moonshot’s own Kimi K3 License — and K3 went live on CheapestInference’s Flagship Pool the same week.

The numbers so far

Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index: 57. For scale: Claude Opus 4.8 scores 56, and the best open-weight model until now — GLM 5.2 — scores 51: the open ceiling jumped six points in one release. Only three closed models score higher — Claude Opus 5 (61), Claude Fable 5 (60) and GPT-5.6 Sol (59). Where every model sits on price-vs-intelligence is our Pareto Frontier report, whose refreshed 2026-07 edition now charts K3 — straight onto the Pareto frontier.
#1 on Frontend Code Arena with 1,679 points — ahead of Claude Fable 5 (1,631), GPT-5.6 Sol (1,618), and GLM 5.2 (1,587).
The Kimi track record. Moonshot’s K2.6 still holds the best open SWE-bench Verified score (80.2), and the K2 line has been the default open choice for tool-heavy agent work — see the tier-fair matchups in our Which-LLM guide.

The honest caveats, same as in our living reports: the index is one composite and task-specific rankings differ, and these are launch-week numbers, mostly on Moonshot’s own serving stack. The weights question resolved on schedule: K3 is downloadable from Hugging Face under Moonshot’s own Kimi K3 License (not the K2 line’s Modified MIT — read the text before self-hosting), and K3 now has its row in State of Open Weights.

What it changed

When K3 was announced, every model above GLM 5.2’s intelligence score was closed, and the open-vs-closed gap had sat at 5+ index points all year. With the weights shipped, the open ceiling is 57 — and after Claude Opus 5 (61) and GPT-5.6 Sol (59) landed in the same month, the gap to the very top stands at 4 index points, the narrowest since the GLM-5 release in February (Artificial Analysis). K3’s $3/$15 list price still undercuts every closed model in its class, and it walked straight onto the Pareto frontier.

Kimi K3 API pricing

Moonshot’s list price for the K3 API is $3 input / $15 output per 1M tokens — undercutting every closed model in its class, but 3–4× the K2 line’s price: the first open flagship priced like a closed mid-tier model (Price Tracker). On CheapestInference that call is made: K3 debuted in its own Flagship Pool, flat-rate from $149/mo, unlimited usage during your reserved hours and very limited seats — the pools page is always the live source for lineup, prices and availability.

Unlimited Kimi K3 API access

Live now. The capacity we secured before launch is serving K3 today in the Flagship Pool — we didn’t start the clock the day the weights dropped.
The usual: one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API, flat-rate time-block subscriptions, no token caps during your reserved hours — so it drops into Claude Code, Cline, or any compatible client; it’s in GET /v1/models now.

If you want to be running K3 this week, create an account — seats in the Flagship Pool are very limited, no waitlist.

CheapestInference serves Kimi K3 (Flagship Pool, from $149/mo), GLM 5.2 and MiniMax M3 (Frontier Pool, from $50.15/mo billed annually) and DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo v2.5 (Core Pool, from $14.02/mo) through one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API on unlimited time-block subscriptions. See the pools or get started.

Combined keys: stack your subscriptions into one credential

Jul 9, 2026

On an Unlimited subscription, the thing you’re actually shaping isn’t tokens — it’s capacity over time. Each subscription gives you a daily coverage window (the 8-hour blocks you reserve) and, within it, some number of requests you can run in parallel. Your real capacity is those two dimensions multiplied: parallel slots × hours.

Most people grow along both axes. You buy a second block to cover more of the day, or a second subscription to run more requests at once during your busy hours. The awkward part used to be the bookkeeping: every subscription minted its own key, so a serious setup meant three or four keys, each live at different times, each with its own capacity — and you juggling which one to paste where.

Combined keys remove the juggling. A combined key (it looks like sk-ci-meta-…) folds two or more of your subscriptions into a single credential, and it behaves like the union of everything underneath it.

Two rules, and that’s it

Coverage adds up. A combined key is live whenever any of its subscriptions has an open window. Reserve the Europe block on one subscription and the Americas block on another, combine them, and the one key covers both stretches of the day.

Overlap stacks parallel capacity. Where two subscriptions cover the same hour, their parallel slots add together. That’s the lever for concurrency: if you need to run more requests side by side during your peak hours, buy a second subscription over those hours and combine it in.

A concrete example. Say you hold one full-day (24h) subscription and add a second subscription on just the Europe block. The combined key gives you:

Double the parallel capacity during the Europe hours — the two subscriptions overlap there, so their slots stack.
Baseline capacity the rest of the day — only the 24h subscription is covering those hours.

Coverage is 24/7 (from the full-day subscription); parallel capacity is shaped to peak exactly when you work.

Allowances stay separate

Combining is about capacity, not billing. Each subscription keeps its own monthly allowance and its own renewal date — nothing is pooled or co-mingled. The practical upside is resilience: if one subscription lapses or you let it cancel, it simply drops out of the union. The combined key keeps working with whatever subscriptions remain — no dead key, no scramble to re-issue credentials.

It works across pools

Requests route by the model you ask for. So a combined key can span subscriptions on different pools — a Core Pool subscription and a Frontier Pool subscription under one key — and each request lands wherever its model lives. Ask for deepseek-v4-flash and it’s served from your Core subscription; ask for glm-5.2 and it’s served from your Frontier one. GET /v1/models on a combined key lists every model you can reach across all of them.

One credential per subscription

Combining a subscription into a key removes that subscription’s standalone key — each subscription has exactly one credential at a time. That’s deliberate: it means there’s never ambiguity about what capacity a given key carries. A key’s coverage and parallel capacity are always the exact sum of the subscriptions it holds, nothing more, nothing hidden. The dashboard walks you through it when you combine.

Creating one

In the Keys page, choose Create API Key and multi-select the subscriptions you want to combine. Before you commit, a preview shows the resulting daily coverage and peak parallel capacity, so you can see the shape you’re buying into. Prefer the API? The Management API does the same thing programmatically.

Full walkthrough in the combined keys guide. If you’re still deciding which blocks to reserve, the live menu and per-block prices are on the pools page.

CheapestInference serves frontier models — Kimi K3, Qwen3.8 Max (Flagship Pool), GLM 5.2, MiniMax M3 (Frontier Pool) and DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo v2.5 (Core Pool) — through one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API on unlimited time-block subscriptions. See the pools or get started.

Qwen coding plans in 2026: what you actually get

Jul 9, 2026 - Last update: Aug 15, 2026

Qwen3-Coder — Alibaba’s open-weights coder family — is one of the most capable coding models you can run over an API, and one of the most searched-for. If you want to run it as your daily coding model, you have a few realistic routes. As with Kimi and GLM, they differ less in headline price than in cost shape: what happens to your bill and your workflow when a heavy week hits.

Update — August 14, 2026: Alibaba’s flagship Qwen3.8 Max is now live in our Flagship Pool on unlimited time-block subscriptions — the review chronicle and specs are in Qwen3.8 Max: specs, benchmarks, pricing & API options, setup on the model page.

Evaluating Qwen coding plans? There’s now a flat-rate unlimited route for Qwen itself. We serve Qwen3.8 Max in the Flagship Pool — and if what you’re after is a fixed monthly bill for a capable open-weights coder at a lower price point, the same cost-shape question applies to GLM 5.2, DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiMo v2.5, and MiniMax M3. Compare the flat-rate pools →

Route 1: the official Qwen Coding Plan

Alibaba Cloud sells a subscription Coding Plan on Model Studio aimed specifically at coding-tool usage of Qwen (plus a few third-party models). It’s first-party access, integrated with Qwen Code and compatible with Claude Code, Cline, and Cursor, and the Qwen coder models — qwen3-coder-plus, qwen3-coder-next, and the newer qwen3.x-plus line — arrive there first.

The trade-off is that the plan is quota-based: each tier grants a request allowance that resets on a schedule — with per-few-hours, weekly, and monthly request caps — and burning through it mid-refactor means waiting for the reset or moving up a tier. The tier lineup itself has already shifted once in 2026 (the entry-level Lite tier stopped accepting new orders), so any number printed here would go stale — check Alibaba’s Coding Plan page for the current tiers and quotas.

Good fit: you want first-party access to the newest Qwen coder models and your volume fits inside a tier’s request quota.

Route 2: per-token APIs

Qwen3-Coder is available per-token from Alibaba’s Model Studio / DashScope API and from several aggregators. No tiers, no resets — you pay for exactly the tokens you burn, which is ideal while you’re evaluating the model or your usage is light. New Model Studio accounts also get a time-limited free-token trial (region-restricted, expiring after a fixed window), useful for a first look — see Alibaba’s pricing page for the current allowance.

The catch is structural, not Qwen-specific: coding agents re-send their whole context on every tool call, so token volume compounds with every iteration. A capable coder will happily churn through long agent sessions — great for output, open-ended for the invoice. Per-token Qwen is cheap per request and unpredictable per month.

Good fit: a few million tokens a month, spiky schedules, or benchmarking before committing.

Route 3: unlimited time blocks on comparable open-weights models

The third shape is the one we sell, so apply the usual discount for self-interest. Since August 14, 2026 this route includes Qwen3.8 Max itself (Flagship Pool), alongside a lineup of comparable open-weights coders at lower price points. You reserve one or more daily 8-hour time blocks and get unlimited usage during them: no token allowances, no request quotas, no resets — a monthly number that’s fixed the day you subscribe. Capacity is shaped by per-key concurrency instead of token or request budgets, so an agent that loops all afternoon changes nothing on the bill.

Two things matter if you’re weighing this against a Qwen plan:

Qwen itself, plus comparable models, one fee. A Flagship Pool block covers Qwen3.8 Max (and Kimi K3); a Frontier Pool block covers GLM 5.2 and MiniMax M3 (1M context); the Core Pool covers DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo v2.5 — switchable per request.
It runs in the same tools. The API speaks both the Anthropic and OpenAI formats, so it drops into Claude Code, Cline, Roo Code, or Qwen Code — no wrapper, just a base-URL change.

Current block pricing is on the pools page.

Good fit: you want a fixed monthly bill for Qwen3.8 Max or a comparable open-weights coder, with predictable working hours.

The three routes at a glance

Route	Cost shape	Limits	Models	Best for
Official Qwen Coding Plan	Fixed monthly subscription	Request quotas that reset (per-few-hours / weekly / monthly)	First-party Qwen coder models (plus some third-party)	First-party Qwen, volume inside quota
Per-token API	Pay per token used	None — spend scales with usage	Any Qwen model on Model Studio / aggregators	Light, spiky, or exploratory use
Flat-rate time blocks (us)	Fixed monthly, per block	Concurrency-shaped; no token or request caps	Qwen3.8 Max (Flagship) plus Kimi K3, GLM, DeepSeek, MiMo, MiniMax	Predictable hours, fixed bill

When to use what

Official Qwen Coding Plan — first-party access, day-one Qwen coder updates, your volume fits the request quota. Per-token — light, spiky, or exploratory usage; pay only for what you burn. Flat-rate time blocks — heavy daily coding in predictable hours where you want a constant bill, on Qwen3.8 Max itself or a comparable open-weights model.

All three answer the same underlying question. It isn’t “which Qwen tier is cheapest” — it’s which cost shape matches how you work.

CheapestInference serves Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8 Max (Flagship Pool), GLM 5.2 and MiniMax M3 (Frontier Pool) and DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo v2.5 (Core Pool) through one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API on unlimited time-block subscriptions. See the pools or get started.

Kimi coding plans in 2026: K2.7, K2.6, and what you actually get

Jul 8, 2026

Kimi K2.7 — Moonshot AI’s open-weights flagship — is currently one of the most capable coding models you can run over an API, and its predecessor K2.6 remains a strong, cheaper-to-serve option per-token from Moonshot and the aggregators. If you want Kimi as your daily coding model, you have three realistic routes. As with GLM, they differ less in headline price than in cost shape: what happens to your bill and your workflow when a heavy week hits.

Route 1: the official Kimi coding plan

Moonshot sells subscription plans aimed specifically at coding-tool usage of Kimi. It’s first-party access, tightly integrated with their own tooling, and the models arrive there first. The trade-off is that the plans are quota-based: each tier grants a usage allowance that resets on a schedule, and burning through it mid-refactor means waiting for the reset or moving up a tier. Tiers and allowances change often enough that any number printed here would go stale — check Moonshot’s pricing page for the current shape.

Good fit: you want first-party access and your coding volume fits comfortably inside a tier’s allowance.

Route 2: per-token APIs

Kimi K2.7 and K2.6 are available per-token from Moonshot’s open platform and from several aggregators. No tiers, no resets — you pay for exactly the tokens you burn, which is ideal while you’re evaluating the model or your usage is light.

The catch is structural, not Kimi-specific: coding agents re-send their whole context on every tool call, so token volume compounds with every iteration. A model as eager to work as K2.7 will happily churn through long agent sessions — great for output, open-ended for the invoice. Per-token Kimi is cheap per request and unpredictable per month.

Good fit: a few million tokens a month, spiky schedules, or benchmarking before committing.

Route 3: unlimited time blocks

The third shape is the one we sell, so apply the usual discount for self-interest — but the mechanics are easy to verify. You reserve one or more daily 8-hour time blocks and get unlimited Kimi K3 usage during them: no token allowances, no resets, a monthly number that’s fixed the day you subscribe. Capacity is shaped by per-key concurrency instead of token budgets, so an agent that loops all afternoon changes nothing on the bill.

Three properties matter for coding specifically:

Kimi K3 — the current Moonshot flagship — under one flat fee. A Flagship Pool block covers Kimi K3 (model id kimi-k3), alongside Qwen3.8 Max, switchable per request — very limited seats. (K2.6 and K2.7 were retired from our pools in July and August 2026; if you need those builds specifically, Route 2 still covers them per-token.)
It runs inside Claude Code natively. The API speaks both the Anthropic and OpenAI formats, so Kimi drops into Claude Code, Cline, Roo Code, or whatever tool you already use — no wrapper, just a base-URL change.
The subscription isn’t Kimi-only. The same Flagship block also covers Qwen3.8 Max (1M context, vision). If Kimi is your main model but not your only one, that’s two flagship coding plans for the price of one.

Current block pricing is on the pools page.

Good fit: Kimi is your daily driver, your working hours are roughly predictable, and you want the bill to be a constant instead of a variable.

When to use what

Official Moonshot plan — first-party access, day-one model updates, your volume fits the quota. Per-token — light, spiky, or exploratory usage; pay only for what you burn. Time-block unlimited — heavy daily coding or agent work in predictable hours; fixed cost, Kimi K3 plus Qwen3.8 Max under one fee.

All three routes serve the same open-weights model family. The question isn’t “which Kimi is better” — it’s which cost shape matches how you work.

DeepSeek subscription: what unlimited flat-monthly access changes

Jul 6, 2026 - Last update: Aug 1, 2026

DeepSeek has a well-earned reputation as the budget option among frontier-quality models. Per-token rates for DeepSeek V4 Flash run around $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output — an order of magnitude below closed-source flagships.

So why would anyone pay a flat monthly fee for it?

Update (Aug 2026): DeepSeek retrained V4 Flash — the 0731 build posts large agent-benchmark gains at the same price, which strengthens every number below. What changed in V4-Flash-0731 →

Because per-token pricing has a property that doesn’t care how low the rate is: cost scales with tokens, and agent tokens scale with iterations, not value. Cheap per token is not the same as cheap per month.

The math nobody runs until the invoice arrives

A coding agent re-sends its growing context on every tool call. A typical task burns 300–500K tokens; an active developer runs dozens of tasks a day. Being conservative:

	Tokens/day	Tokens/month	Per-token cost (V4 Flash rates)
Light use	2M	60M	~$11/mo
Daily driver	15M	450M	~$80/mo
Heavy agent loops	50M	1.5B	~$270/mo

The rate is tiny. The bill is not — and it’s unpredictable, because next month’s iteration count is unknowable in advance.

A time-block subscription inverts this: you reserve a daily 8-hour window and usage inside it is unlimited. The number on your invoice is decided when you subscribe, not by how many times your agent loops. DeepSeek V4 Flash is served in the Core Pool — current pricing is on the pools page.

At “daily driver” volume, the flat block is cheaper than even DeepSeek’s per-token rates — and the gap only widens from there.

What you get with the subscription

DeepSeek V4 Flash with a 1M-token context window — whole codebases, long documents, extended agent runs in a single request.
No token caps during your blocks. The plan is unlimited in tokens; capacity is shaped by per-key concurrency instead, so one busy key never affects another.
MiMo v2.5 included. A Core Pool subscription covers every model in the pool — Xiaomi’s MiMo v2.5 shares the same 1M-context class.
Drop-in API. OpenAI-compatible (/v1/chat/completions) and Anthropic-compatible (/anthropic/v1/messages) — point your SDK, Cline, or Claude Code at it with model id deepseek-v4-flash.

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.cheapestinference.com/v1",
    api_key="sk-...",  # subscriber key
)
r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-v4-flash",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Review this repo for race conditions: ..."}],
)

Common questions

Is there a DeepSeek subscription? Not from DeepSeek itself — their first-party API is pay-per-token (with peak/off-peak and cache discounts, but no flat plan). CheapestInference sells a flat-monthly DeepSeek subscription: unlimited DeepSeek V4 Flash (the 0731 build) during your reserved daily 8-hour blocks, plus MiMo v2.5 in the same Core Pool.

How much does a DeepSeek subscription cost? From $16.49/month per 8-hour daily block ($14.02/mo billed annually), up to full 24/7 coverage — live pricing on /pools. No token caps during your hours.

Does the subscription include the latest DeepSeek model? Yes — the pool serves the current V4 Flash build under the stable model id deepseek-v4-flash; when DeepSeek retrained it (V4-Flash-0731, July 2026), subscribers got the new build with no migration.

When per-token DeepSeek is still the right call

Honesty clause: if your usage is light or spiky — a few million tokens a month, unpredictable hours — per-token is cheaper and you should use it. The flat block wins when usage is heavy and concentrated in predictable hours: agent development, batch processing, a working day of assisted coding. That’s the break-even logic in one sentence; the full break-even analysis is here.

CheapestInference serves DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo v2.5 (Core Pool, from $14.02/mo billed annually) and GLM 5.2 and MiniMax M3 (Frontier Pool) through one OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API on unlimited time-block subscriptions. See the pools or get started.