---
title: "MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/models/moonshotai__kimi-k3/
description: "MoonshotAI: Kimi K3: $3.00/M in, $15.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper."
---

# MoonshotAI: Kimi K3 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai

> MoonshotAI: Kimi K3: $3.00/M in, $15.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper.

[Leaderboard](/) / Moonshot AI

# Kimi K3

Moonshot AI · released 2026-07-16 · modified-mit

 $6.00 per million tokens, balanced Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic

## Grok 4.6 scores higher and costs less — but you would give something up.

**+1.2** on the capability index and **50% cheaper** ($3.00/M against $6.00/M). What you lose:

 - 1.0M → 500K context
- no video input

Capability scores do not measure context length, output ceiling or which inputs a model accepts, so a higher score does not mean a drop-in replacement.

## Our take

 editorial — not a measurement

The strongest open-weight model in this dataset on measured intelligence — AA index 60, matching GLM 5.3 and within three points of Opus 5, with an LMArena score of 1489 at max effort. The number that stands out is latency: 3.3 seconds to first token, more than 10x faster than Opus 5 (~41s) and 30x faster than GPT-5.6 Sol (~105s). If you need near-frontier quality in an interactive product, nothing else in the sampled set is close on responsiveness. $3/$15 is not cheap for open weights, but you can self-host and escape that entirely. 1M context, 1M max output.

### Strengths

 - AA intelligence 60 and LMArena 1489 — frontier-adjacent
- 3.3s time-to-first-token, by far the fastest in the sampled set
- 1M context and 1M max output tokens
- Open weights — self-hostable

### Weaknesses

 - $3/$15 hosted is expensive relative to other open-weight options
- 35 output tokens/sec is slow once generation starts
- Modified-MIT licence not independently verified

### Reach for it when

 - Interactive products needing near-frontier quality
- Self-hosted frontier-adjacent deployment
- Latency-critical agentic loops

### Avoid it if

 - Sustained generation throughput matters more than first-token latency
- You want the cheapest hosted tokens

Sources: openrouter.ai · artificialanalysis.ai · arena.ai

### Every price dimension

| Input | $3.00 /M |
| --- | --- |
| Output | $15.00 /M |
| Cached input | $0.300 /M |

### Independent scores

| Intelligence | 59.7 |
| --- | --- |
| Coding | 76.2 |
| Agentic | 54.3 |
| LMArena Elo | 1476.3 max |

Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.

#### Best rankings by task

 - website #1 of 151 1372
- codecategories #1 of 145 1407
- gamedev #1 of 144 1431
- dataviz #1 of 142 1376
- uicomponent #1 of 140 1377
- 3d #1 of 136 1445
- mobileapps #1 of 56 1290
- svg #2 of 98 1356

### Capability

| Context window | 1.0M |
| --- | --- |
| Max output | 1.0M |
| Input modes | text, image, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |
| Open weights | yes |

### Provenance

| Price source | openrouter.ai |
| --- | --- |
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |

Kimi K3 is a 2.8T parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model from Moonshot AI. It is suited for complex coding, knowledge work, and long-horizon agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at...