AI Coding Field Notes

Kimi API pricing: what 5 models cost a coding agent

Every Kimi model in the catalog that has been ranked in an agent category, priced three ways — list, cache read, and what the two come to at the token mix an agent actually sends. Recomputed from the source catalog on 2026-10-11.

List price is not the bill. A coding agent re-reads its context every step, so about 95.6% of the tokens it sends are cache reads — and how deep Kimi discounts a cache read decides the bill more than the number printed in the row. That discount is a vendor policy, not a per-model one, and no published rate card puts it next to the other vendors’.

What Kimi charges per million tokens

5 Kimi models that have been ranked in an agent category of the Design Arena, read from OpenRouter’s public catalog on 2026-10-11. Three prices per row: what the row lists, what a cache read costs, and what the two come to at the token mix a coding agent actually sends.

Kimi does not have one cache-read rate — it has 5. Across 5 rows the discount runs from 10.0% to 68.8% of that row’s own input price (10%, 23.1%, 26.8%, 30%, 68.8%). So a cheaper list price here can still be the dearer call once an agent starts caching, and no single discount figure describes this vendor. Repriced at a coding agent’s mix, Kimi’s list input price overstates what an agent pays by a median 3.2× (range 1.4×–6.6×).

1 row is marked batch — the batch entries the catalog lists separately. They are kept apart on purpose: folding them in would read as if a normal call cost half of what it does.

$ / 1M at agent mix $ in / 1M $ cache read / 1M $ out / 1M Model Context Long-context step Best agents rank
$0.1711 $0.50 $0.15 $2.50 Kimi K2.5 262K — #15 godotgamedev
$0.1798 $0.65 $0.15 $3.41 Kimi K2.6 262K — #2 agentichtmlslides
$0.2092 $0.6712 $0.18 $3.35 Kimi K2.7 Code 262K — #7 htmlslides
$0.3439 $2.28 $0.228 $11.40 Kimi K3 batch 1M — #2 fullstack
$0.5876 $0.80 $0.55 $10.00 Kimi K3 1M — #2 fullstack

Cheapest Kimi row an agent can call normally is Kimi K2.5 at $0.1711 per million; the dearest is $0.5876, 3× more. Both numbers exclude the batch rows above. Both are computed, not quoted — the arithmetic and the weights are in the JSON.

Kimi against the other vendors, on the same arithmetic

Same catalog, same day, same token mix. The column that decides an agent’s bill is not the list price — it is how deep that vendor discounts a cache read, because about 95.6% of what an agent sends is a cache read.

Vendor Rows Cache read, % of its own input List price overstates the agent bill by Cheapest non-batch row at agent mix
xiaomi 1 0.8% 18.4× $0.0237
DeepSeek 1 8.3% 7.9× $0.0264
Claude 20 2.5–10% 6.6× $0.3017
Gemini 12 10% 6.6× $0.0769
OpenAI 9 10–10.4% 6.3× $0.2042
Llama 3 12% 6.0× $0.2067
Grok 5 15–25% 5.0× $0.2494
thinkingmachines 1 17% 4.7× $0.215
Qwen 1 20% 4.2× $0.355
GLM 8 18.3–98.3% 4.1× $0.0646
upstage 1 20% 4.1× $0.0219
MiniMax 1 20% 4.1× $0.0731
Kimi 5 10–68.8% 3.2× $0.1711

The spread in that fourth column is the whole point: Claude at 6.6× against Kimi at 3.2×, across 20 and 5 rows. Two rows with the same list price, one from each, are not the same price to an agent — and no published rate card puts those two numbers next to each other.

All models, every vendor, one table · Put your own token counts in · JSON · CSV

What was written about Kimi while these were measured

4 figures in these field notes come from a sentence that names Kimi. These are quoted from the write-up, dated the day it went out — unlike the table above, they are not recomputed, so read each one as of its own date.

All 629 figures, every kind

A Kimi price that looks wrong? Say which row — the form already knows it is about Kimi; you only have to say what the number is now. Every figure here is computed from a published catalog, so a wrong one is a bug, not an opinion.

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