Kimi K3

Kimi K3 lists base rates of $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Estimate both input and output token volume and any additional charges for your workload. $3/$15 per million input/output tokens; cached input $0.30. Cache writes add $3/MTok for 5-minute TTL or $6/MTok for 1-hour TTL; hits refresh TTL without another write charge. API access requires a successful top-up of at least $1. max_completion_tokens defaults to 131,072 and can be set up to 1,048,576. Kimi K3 uses a custom license; self-hosting has compute costs.

Kimi K3 accepts about 1.05M tokens of context. That only matters if you routinely send very long documents, large codebases, or multi-turn histories that approach that limit.

Kimi K3 is a frontier tier from Moonshot AI. It suits open-weight frontier work, long-context, multimodal. Thinking is always on; preserve complete assistant reasoning/tool history. Vision input requires base64 or ms:// rather than public image URLs, and temperature/top_p/n/penalties are fixed. Current docs discourage production web-search use. The custom licence requires an agreement for Model-as-a-Service businesses above $20M aggregate licensee/affiliate revenue over consecutive 12 months; commercial products above 100M monthly active users or $20M monthly revenue require Kimi K3 UI attribution. Internal use and official/certified serving routes have separate exemptions. July 16 is Kimi Code's release date, distinct from weights publication.

Kimi K3 publishes open weights, but self-hosting depends on the licence, hardware footprint, quantisation quality, and serving stack. A hosted API is often cheaper until you have measured throughput and concurrency on your own hardware.