[SwellJoe]

I don't understand how the K3 numbers keep coming out cheap for people. I recently started to add it to my security auditing benchmarks and found it was going to cost about twice as much as Opus 4.8. It blew through the $100 budget I'd set at like 11%. In the tasks I'm doing it seems crazy expensive because it chews so much, burning a tremendous amount of tokens.

[InsideOutSanta]

I think the way people usually compare pricing is fundamentally flawed. You can't compare token prices because different models use different tokenizers, and you can't compare tokenizer-normalized token prices because different models at different settings use more or fewer tokens to complete the same task at a different level of quality.

Based on my entirely subjective experience, the $100 Moonshot plan using only K3 is comparable to the $200 Anthropic deal using the whole Fable allocation and Opus 4.8 for the rest.

[SwellJoe]

I got the $19 plan, and it's anemic. One tiny task blew through the 5-hour budget and 19% of the weekly budget. A completely useless amount of usage. OpenAI's $20 plan feels like 100x more generous (I don't think I'm exaggerating here). Someone in another thread said their plans are cheaper in China, maybe that's the difference, I dunno.

But, I'm finding Kimi K3 terrifyingly expensive in the way that Fable and GPT 5.5 Pro are at token rates. Not as expensive as those, but expensive enough to where if you don't put a budget cap on it, you might wake up bankrupt if you leave a task running overnight. Not because of the per-token cost, but because how many tokens it's going to burn.

[try-working]

I have the second largest Kimi plan, the Chinese version. When K2.6 was their latest model, the quota was good; it was like GPT $100 is now or what the $20 version was in December.

When K2.7 was released, they cut quota by 80%. I can't tell how much they have further cut it after the K3 release because it's barely worth using at all. I just use it in my model router since I have the annual plan paid for.

It's just not a serious model or company.

[nullify88]

In the $19 plan, I've been able to reverse engineer both an android APK and firmware (in Ghidra and Radre) for a baby rocker and build a quick PoC application in my session limit. And then further refined the app in another session at another point in time without leaving Opus. I dont consider that to be a tiny task. How are you blowing through your usage?

[SwellJoe]

I have no idea. Seems like normal stuff. I used Kimi Code with K3 to add support for Kimi Code to flar (https://swelljoe.com/post/i-let-every-agent-implement-its-ow...), a task I've done with almost every major model/agent combo. Most show up as a blip on the usage chart...it's basically usually one file, a README update, and adding the agent name to the CLI.

Then, I added it to my benchmark of security vulnerability auditing capability, and it burned a bazillion tokens, burned through the 5-hour limit, burned through $100 in extra usage I'd allocated, and was only 11% finished. That's more expensive than any model I've tested other than GPT 5.5 Pro on this task.

These are things I've done with a bunch of other models, I feel like I have a notion of what they ought to cost, and with K3, they end up being crazy expensive. (And it seems to be a function of how many tokens it burns accomplishing the tasks.)

[lukan]

I guess the problem is, that claude's 5 h/weekly limit is not consistent, but depends how many other people are using it/how much ressources Antrophic currently has. I did huge amounts of work without hitting the limit - and small tasks at some other times that hit the limit before it completed.

Those who pay for the expensive direct API, get served first.

[Barbing]

Not surprising given the way they served super low-quality inference before they acquired compute from Musk.

And not convinced they couldn’t have instead tried the It’s A Wonderful Life strategy (“fam we’re oversold, would some of y’all be OK to limit your usage? We’ll get you back one day!”)

[port11]

I wonder if the harness itself is not token-efficient? It would be fairer to compare K3 using the same generic harness, such as a Pi setup with some sane extensions for token optimisation.

[InsideOutSanta]

Yes, the OpenAI plans are much more generous than both Moonshot's and Anthropic's. It's the only provider of the three where the $20 plan is at all usable for programming.

[versteegen]

Disagree. Actually, in API cost equivalent, the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus plan gives you ~$100 of usage, while $20/mo Claude Pro gives you >$250 of usage (I measure at ~$300 in my last week), though that is currently +50% for the next month. Other tiers should be in the same proportion. In my subjective experience Claude does currently go further. The OpenAI limits being higher is old information but everyone is still repeating it.

[jmspring]

OpenAIs $20 plan has been more useful than ClaudeCode 20x max both in terms of price and performance.

I was dealing with something around authz/n with Claude code running Fable. It chewed through a couple of questions (these were implementation, not security reviews) and on one it shit it’s pants and said I can’t do that, here is Opus.

I’ve dropped my anthropic plan level, it’s just not worth it.

[someguyiguess]

Yeah that’s absolutely absurd. My experience has been the opposite. GPT can’t even seem to complete tags running more than an hour without freezing.

[bg24]

I believe your statement. Labs do not publish subscription vs. api revenue and difficult to guess with no priors.

Subscription is to drive adoption - fixed cost, can adjust the usage eg. give resets, increase quota based on capacity available. We subscribers tend to take it as a mandatory benefit :-) For labs, it is not letting the capacity go waste.

api is the $$ driver - pay per use, enterprises.

Right now, Kimi needs to first hit the subscribers at the level of OpenAI and Anthropic. With the api usage skyrocketing due to K3, it will be clear in a few months on the actual subscription benefits.

[KronisLV]

> Based on my entirely subjective experience, the $100 Moonshot plan using only K3 is comparable to the $200 Anthropic deal using the whole Fable allocation and Opus 4.8 for the rest.

For me, the Moonshot 100$ plan felt like it gives me lower total amount of work I can do than the Anthropic 100$ plan (probably within like 30% of each other). Kimi has way more generous 5 hour limits (never hit those once, whereas I do regularly with Opus) but the 7-day and monthly ones are lower. However, with the annual billing, Moonshot's 200$ tier plan becomes way better, because you get it for 159 USD per month.

There's also the odd thing of Anthropic's 100$ plan charging me 108 EUR so seems like their sticker price does not include VAT but Kimi's did, cause I paid like 87 EUR. Wrote down some initial thoughts at https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/kimi-k3-is-out-is-anthropic-don... but it's hard to do exact comparisons (even the same task will have way different real token amounts per model).

Still, Kimi K3 is a pretty cool model! On high reasoning, it was pretty close to Opus 4.8 and didn't seem to waste as many tokens as Max.

[hereme888]

That's the sort of useful info I look for!