Cost by workload size
Price comparison
| Feature |  Kimi K3 |  Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Moonshot / Kimi | Anthropic |
| Input / M tokens | $3 | $3 |
| Output / M tokens | $15 | $15 |
| Cached input read | $0.30 | $0.30 |
| Context window | 1.0M | 1M |
| Batch discount | — | — |
| Vision | Yes | Yes |
| Audio | — | — |
| Reasoning tokens | Yes | — |
What your workload actually costs
Prices per token hide the real picture. Here are three common workloads computed with AITokenCalculator's own engine (medium reasoning effort, no batch, no cache):
| Workload | Kimi K3 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 in / 300 out | $0.012 | $0.0075 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
| 10,000 in / 2,000 out | $0.09 | $0.06 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
| 100,000 in / 20,000 out | $0.9 | $0.6 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
| Monthly @ 1,000 req/day (standard) | $2,739.38 | $1,826.25 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
Analysis
On input price, Kimi K3 wins at $3/M — roughly effectively tied than its rival. Output tells a sharper story: Kimi K3 charges $15/M , essentially matching its rival — and output is where chatty and agentic workloads bleed money.
Context capacity differs too: Kimi K3 fits 1.0M tokens (~786,432 words) versus 1M. If you feed whole documents or codebases, that gap decides feasibility before price even matters.
Moonshot’s flagship against Claude’s workhorse. Kimi aggressively prices long-context tasks and handles very large inputs well; Claude remains the safer bet for production coding assistants and nuanced writing. Worth benchmarking on your own evals before switching.
Numbers shift as providers reprice — check the full AI model pricing table, then run your own prompt through the calculator preloaded with Kimi K3 or with Claude Sonnet 4.6.