---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to Kimi K2.6 · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/moonshotai__kimi-k2.6/
description: "5 models score at least as high as Kimi K2.6 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 0 give up nothing measurable; the other 5 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to Kimi K2.6 · Undominated.ai

> 5 models score at least as high as Kimi K2.6 and cost no more on a balanced workload. 0 give up nothing measurable; the other 5 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to Kimi K2.6

Moonshot AI · LMArena 1455 · $1.71/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## Everything cheaper and higher-scoring gives something up.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, **5** score at least as high as Kimi K2.6 and cost no more under at least one workload. **5** do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Kimi K2.6, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | Kimi K2.6 $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $1.71 | 0 | 4 |
| Summarise | $0.877 | 0 | 4 |
| Chat | $1.93 | 0 | 5 |
| Code gen | $2.72 | 0 | 5 |
| Agentic | $0.938 | 0 | 4 |

Workload mixes are defined on the [methodology page](/methodology/). Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

## What you would be replacing

| Intelligence | 1455 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 262K |
| Max output | 236K |
| Input modes | text, image |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for Kimi K2.6](/models/moonshotai__kimi-k2.6/).

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 5

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +35.2 | $0.750 | Balanced −56% Summarise −60% Chat −55% Code gen −54% Agentic −57% | 236K → 66K max output |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash Google | 1476.5 +21.5 | $1.50 | Balanced −12% Summarise −19% Chat −10% Code gen −8% Agentic −15% | 236K → 66K max output |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi | 1465 tie | $0.544 | Balanced −68% Summarise −62% Chat −75% Code gen −76% Agentic −74% | 236K → 131K max output no image input |
| Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen | 1456.2 tie | $0.560 | Balanced −67% Summarise −66% Chat −68% Code gen −68% Agentic −67% | 236K → 131K max output |
| GLM 5.2 Z.ai | 1465.4 tie | $1.92 chat | Chat −1% Code gen −3% | no image input |

## What this compares, and what it leaves out

 - Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked *tie* rather than an improvement — see [significance bands](/significance/).
 - 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
 - Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
 - Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
 - The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the [value frontier](/frontier/), and every other model something cheaper beats is [listed here](/alternatives/).