Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a model with roughly 3 trillion parameters and a context window of up to a million tokens. Here's a look at where it's genuinely free, where it costs money, and what the paid tiers cost.
Moonshot AI has released Kimi K3, a new model already being compared to Fable 5 and GPT-5.6. It's been quickly dubbed a "free competitor" to the flagship models, but that comes with caveats: only a stripped-down tier and, unsurprisingly, the open weights for self-hosting are genuinely free — cloud access and the multi-agent mode are paid.
Under the hood it has around 3 trillion parameters and a context window of up to a million tokens. In practice, that means the model can hold an entire book, a large repository, or a stack of long documents in its head at once — exactly where ordinary models tend to lose the thread and start mixing things up.
You can work with K3 through the API, and for anyone who just wants to try it, there's a Kimi K3: Max version with a chat interface and dedicated coding modes.
K3 Swarm is separately worth a look. It's a bundle of several agents that split a large task among themselves: one digs, another verifies, a third assembles the result. It's exactly the pattern things are heading toward — not "the smartest single chat," but a team of workers for a specific job.
How Much It Costs
Kimi does have a free tier, but it's limited: capped quotas and no Thinking mode. For full functionality, you'll need to pay:
- Moderato — $19/month: the base paid tier with higher quotas.
- Allegretto — $39/month: adds Instant and Thinking modes.
- Allegro — $99/month: full access to Agent Swarm, the multi-agent mode.
- Vivace — $199/month: the highest limits.
Via the API, billing is per token (early estimates put it at roughly half the per-token cost of GPT-5.6). Another path is downloading the open weights and running the model yourself — that's genuinely free, but everything then depends on your own GPUs.
What matters here isn't just the model's size, but that a serious frontier model is being released with open weights again. While some are waiting for access to the next closed flagship, K3 can be downloaded and self-hosted if you want — with a million-token context window and a multi-agent mode on hand.
You can try it on Kimi's site.