Kimi Pricing 2026: Plans, API Costs & Free Tier

Kimi is free to start, and that is the fastest way to summarise Moonshot AI’s pricing. The Kimi app gives you unlimited basic chat, file uploads and web search on a $0 Adagio plan, while paid memberships climb from $19 a month to $199 a month for heavy agent and coding use. If you build on the API instead, you pay per token, and the flagship Kimi K3.1 Pro costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.

That gap between a free chat app and a metered developer API is the whole story of Kimi pricing, and it trips up most buyers. This guide breaks down every subscription tier, the full per-model API rate card, the real limits of the free plan, and how Kimi’s cost compares against Claude, GPT and DeepSeek. Every API rate was re-checked against Moonshot’s own developer docs on October 24, 2026, and the app plans are the international prices Kimi charges in US dollars.

The Key Takeaways

• Free forever tier: the Adagio plan costs $0 with unlimited basic chat, but only about 6 agent credits and no Agent Swarm or Kimi Code.
• App plans: paid memberships run $19 (Plus), $39 (Pro), $99 (Max) and $199 (Ultra) per month, and every paid plan now includes Kimi Code.
• Flagship API: Kimi K3.1 Pro, released on October 23, 2026, is $2 / $10 per million input/output tokens, a third below the $3 / $15 that Kimi K3 still costs.
• Budget API is closing: Kimi K2.6 and K2.7 Code cost $0.95 / $4, but Moonshot shuts the K2 series to new users on October 31, 2026 and retires it by the end of December.
• Level with Sonnet and Sol, below the flagships: K3.1 Pro costs the same as Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol ($2 / $10) and half as much as Claude Opus 5.5 ($4 / $20), and it scores higher than Sol on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

How Much Does Kimi Cost? The Quick Answer

Kimi costs nothing to try. The Kimi app is free on the Adagio tier, and paid plans run from $19 a month up to $199 a month depending on how much agent and coding work you need. On the Moonshot API you pay per token instead of a flat fee, so the flagship Kimi K3.1 Pro costs $2 per million input and $10 per million output tokens, while the older Kimi K3 stays at $3 / $15.

Which number matters depends on how you use Kimi. Casual users who chat, upload documents and search the web will mostly live on the free or $19 plan. Developers wiring Kimi into an app, an agent or a coding tool care about the per-token rate, because that is what scales with usage. The rest of this guide covers both sides in full.

Kimi Subscription Plans and Membership Pricing

Moonshot rebuilt Kimi’s paid memberships in October 2026, and the four international plans are now Plus, Pro, Max and Ultra, on top of the free Adagio tier. Every paid plan is available monthly or annually, and the annual option shaves roughly 20% off the monthly rate, according to Moonshot’s pricing details, captured on October 19, 2026. Annual billing on the top plan saves you up to $480 a year. All paid features now draw on one shared monthly credit pool, so a heavy Kimi Code week leaves fewer credits for agents and slides. The old tempo-named plans (Moderato, Allegretto, Allegro and Vivace) are now legacy plans: existing subscribers can keep and renew them, but new buyers see the four new tiers, and Moonshot says purchase eligibility is shown on its membership page.

Adagio (Free)

The free plan gives you unlimited basic chat, file uploads and live web access, which covers most everyday questions. It includes about 6 agent credits, a single concurrent task and 200 professional database calls. Agent Swarm, Kimi Code and Kimi Claw are locked, so serious automation is off the table until you upgrade.

Plus ($19/mo)

The entry paid tier is the sweet spot for solo users who want real agent work. Plus unlocks Kimi Code, Agent Swarm, office file processing, Deep Research and website deployment, with two agent tasks running at once, 10 scheduled tasks and 20 projects with 20GB of storage. Kimi Code on the new plans has a rolling five-hour usage limit and no weekly limit.

Pro ($39/mo)

Pro is aimed at power users. It doubles the agent credits of Plus and is the first tier with Goal Mode and a dedicated Kimi Claw, Moonshot’s cloud-hosted browser and computer agent. Parallel tasks stay at two, and scheduled tasks rise to 15. It is also the cheapest plan that lists the faster Kimi K3.1 Pro Highspeed model.

Max ($99/mo)

Max is the heavy-workload plan, with five times the agent credits of Plus, four agent tasks at once, 20 scheduled tasks, and 100 projects with 50GB of storage. Most independent developers who run agents daily will not need more than this.

Ultra ($199/mo)

Ultra is the top tier, built for non-stop automation. It doubles Max to ten times the agent credits of Plus and adds 25 scheduled tasks, with the same four parallel tasks and 50GB of storage. At $199 a month it sits well below what comparable enterprise AI seats cost elsewhere, which is a big part of Kimi’s appeal.

Is Kimi Free? What the Adagio Tier Really Includes

Yes, Kimi is free to use, and that has not changed in 2026. The free Adagio tier still gives you unlimited standard chat, document uploads and web browsing, powered by a capable model rather than a stripped-down one. For asking questions, summarising files and general research, you may never need to pay a cent.

The catch is agentic work. Moonshot has tightened the free tier so that autonomous multi-step tasks, Agent Swarm and Kimi Code sit behind paid plans. You get only a handful of agent credits per period on Adagio, which is fine for a quick test but not for building. If you want Kimi to run long research jobs, control a browser or write and execute code, the $19 Plus plan is the real starting point. You can read the full model breakdown in our guide to the Kimi K2.6 model.

Kimi API Pricing Per Million Tokens

If you are a developer, the Moonshot API is where Kimi pricing gets interesting. You pay only for the tokens you send and receive, billed per million, and rates vary sharply by model. Unusually, the newest model is not the dearest: Kimi K3.1 Pro costs less than the Kimi K3 it replaced, while the cheaper K2 models are on their way out. Prompt caching can cut your input cost dramatically when you reuse the same context.

Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3 pricing

The flagship Kimi K3.1 Pro is a post-trained version of K3 with the same 2.8 trillion parameters, 104 billion of them active per token, and the same 1 million token context window. It costs $2 input and $10 output per million tokens, with cache hits at $0.20, a tenth of the miss rate, which rewards workloads that reuse long system prompts or documents. The faster K3.1 Pro Highspeed doubles the input and output rates to $4 / $20. Kimi K3 is still on sale at $3 / $15 with $0.30 cache hits, so on the API there is little reason to stay on it. Moonshot treats K3.1 Pro as a flagship model, so its API unlocks only after a top-up of at least $1. Full specs and benchmarks are in our Kimi K3.1 Pro explainer and the Kimi K3 deep dive.

Kimi K2.7 Code and K2.6 pricing

K2.7 Code and K2.6 both cost $0.95 input and $4 output per million tokens, which made them the value workhorses of the range. Both publish cache-hit rates, $0.19 for K2.7 Code and $0.16 for K2.6, and K2.7 Code is tuned for long-horizon coding and multi-agent orchestration. If speed matters more than price, K2.7 Code HighSpeed doubles every rate to $1.90 / $8 for output Moonshot puts at about 180 tokens per second. Do not build anything new on them, though. Moonshot’s pricing page says the K2 series closes to newly registered users on October 31, 2026 and that all K2 models will be retired by the end of December 2026, with existing users unaffected until then.

Kimi K2.5 and K2 are retired

If an older guide sends you to K2.5 at $0.60 / $3 or the original Kimi K2 at $0.60 / $2.50, neither can be bought any more. Moonshot retired the kimi-k2 series on May 25, 2026 and kimi-k2.5 on August 31, 2026, and calls to K2.5 now return a 404 “model not found” error, according to its model list. On price the nearest replacement was K2.6 at $0.95 / $4, but with the rest of the K2 line retiring by December, the lasting replacement is K3.1 Pro at $2 / $10.

One extra cost to plan for is tooling. Web search is billed per call on top of token usage. In September 2026 Moonshot moved it to standalone endpoints at $0.002 per Web Search Basic call, $0.003 per Web Search Pro call and $0.002 per URL fetch, charged only when a call returns results. The older built-in web search tool still costs $0.005 a call, and its results count as input tokens on your next request. Moonshot publishes these fees on its web search pricing docs. They are small per call but add up at scale.

What Does Kimi Actually Cost? A Worked Example

Per-million rates are abstract, so here is a concrete job. Say you send 1 million input tokens and generate 1 million output tokens, which is a large task, roughly a book’s worth of text each way. On Kimi K3.1 Pro that costs $2 plus $10, so $12 total before any caching. The same job costs $18 on Kimi K3, and $4.95 on K2.6 for as long as K2.6 stays available.

Caching changes the math again. If most of that input is a repeated document or system prompt, K3.1 Pro bills the cached part at $0.20 per million instead of $2, cutting the total closer to $10. Writing to the cache is billed too, at $2 per million for the default five-minute cache or $4 for a one-hour cache, so caching pays off when the same prefix is read many times. A lower token price is not the whole bill, though: Artificial Analysis found K3.1 Pro writes about 14% more output tokens per task than K3, so its cost per benchmark task stays about level with K3’s. For real chat apps, where inputs are short and outputs modest, most requests cost fractions of a cent. Our guide on when to use which AI model walks through those trade-offs.

Kimi Pricing on OpenRouter, Groq and Other Hosts

Moonshot is not the only place to buy Kimi tokens. Third-party inference hosts resell the open-weight models, sometimes below Moonshot’s own list price, and they add features like unified billing and faster hardware. On OpenRouter, seven of the 19 K3 listings charged Moonshot’s own $3 / $15 on September 25, 2026, and ten sat below it, from DeepInfra at $2.85 / $14.25 down to about $0.88 / $10.53 for the cheapest four-bit listing. K2.6 starts at about $0.45 / $1.90 through the cheapest reseller. K3.1 Pro is different for now: OpenRouter lists it at Moonshot’s $2 / $10, and until Moonshot publishes its weights, promised by November 4, 2026, no reseller can run it on its own hardware.

Groq, the usual pick for high-speed inference, no longer serves Kimi at all. It shut down its last Kimi K2 model on April 15, 2026 and points users to GPT-OSS 120B instead, so for speed on Kimi itself the route is now Moonshot’s K3.1 Pro Highspeed, which Moonshot rates at two to three times the speed of the standard model. For jobs that can wait, Moonshot’s Batch API, open to all users since April 2026, saves 40% against real-time calls. If throughput and latency matter more than the lowest headline price, compare hosts before you commit.

Kimi Cost vs Claude, GPT and DeepSeek

Kimi’s pitch has always been frontier-class output at a fraction of Western prices, and K3.1 Pro makes that pitch against the mid-tier rather than the flagships. It costs half as much as Claude Opus 5.5 ($4 / $20) and 80% less than GPT-6 Astra ($10 / $50). Against GPT-6.1 Sol, OpenAI’s mid-tier model, and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5, it is level, because both also cost $2 / $10. DeepSeek, the other Chinese price leader, stays far cheaper, at a rate that now doubles during weekday peak hours (01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC). Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 is the other Chinese multi-trillion-parameter model chasing that same value crown. How that gap plays out inside the chat apps is covered in our Kimi vs ChatGPT comparison. Against DeepSeek itself, our Kimi vs DeepSeek comparison runs the numbers at both peak and off-peak rates.

On capability, K3.1 Pro closes most of the gap K3 left. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v4.3.2, read October 24, 2026), K3.1 Pro scores 55.1, fourth of every model tracked, against 57.6 for Claude Opus 5.5, 56.0 for Claude Sonnet 5.5, 52.7 for GPT-6 Astra and 51.8 for GPT-6.1 Sol. So K3.1 Pro beats Sol on score at the same token price, but not on cost per task: Artificial Analysis puts one index task at $2.11 on K3.1 Pro against $0.72 on Sol, because K3.1 Pro uses far more tokens. K3 itself scores 43.6, behind several open-weight models led by Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro (46.3). For a cheaper, capable coder, DeepSeek may serve you better, as covered in our best AI for coding roundup.

Can You Run Kimi for Free by Self-Hosting?

This is where Kimi gets interesting for cost-conscious teams. Moonshot ships its models as open weights, and K3’s landed on July 27, 2026, so you can download it today and run it with no per-token fee at all. The K3.1 Pro weights are not out yet: Moonshot promises them by November 4, 2026, and it shipped K3’s on the date it promised. The catch is the hardware. The published K3 repository is 96 safetensors shards totalling about 1.56 TB, and it already ships at roughly four bits per parameter, so there is no further quantisation trick waiting to shrink it onto a desktop card.

For most people, self-hosting only pays off at very high volume, where the fixed cost of hardware beats a metered API bill. Smaller teams are usually better off with the hosted API or a subscription. Every Kimi model up to K3 is downloadable now, which is why Kimi ranks so highly among the best open-source AI models for anyone who wants full control and zero usage fees. Note that K3 ships under Moonshot’s own Kimi K3 License rather than the permissive MIT terms the earlier K2 releases carried.

Which Kimi Plan Should You Choose?

Match the plan to the job. If you just want a smart chatbot for questions, files and web search, the free Adagio tier is enough. If you want Kimi to run agents, browse and code, start at $19 Plus and climb only when you hit its limits. Developers building products should skip the app entirely and use the API, where K3.1 Pro is now both the strongest and, per token, the cheapest Kimi you can still sign up for.

If you would rather not manage a Moonshot subscription at all, a multi-model creation app like Fello AI lets you tap Kimi models alongside other frontier models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Deepseek and more, which is handy when you want to compare outputs. Thanks to Fello AI you can pay only $9.99 a month and use multiple models at once. On a Mac it arrives as a native Kimi desktop client, with no Moonshot account to top up. Whichever route you pick, Kimi remains one of the most aggressively priced frontier options on the market, and the free tier means testing it costs nothing.

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