How much does the Kimi K2.6 API cost?

Kimi K2.6 costs $0.95 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $15.50.

What is the context window of Kimi K2.6?

Kimi K2.6 supports a context window of 262,144 tokens (262K), with up to 262K output tokens per response.

Is Kimi K2.6 open source?

Yes — Kimi K2.6 is an open-weights model released under the Modified MIT license, so it can be downloaded and self-hosted.

What are the best alternatives to Kimi K2.6?

The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.

Kimi K2.6

Name: Kimi K2.6
Price: 0.95 USD
Author: Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI·Apr 2026reasoningopen weights · Modified MIT

Kimi K2.6 continued Moonshot's trajectory of shipping open-weights models that crowd the closed frontier: independent coding evaluations place it level with GPT-5.5, while its official API costs $0.95/$4 per million tokens — several times cheaper (and cheaper still via third-party hosts). It is multimodal, built for long-horizon coding, UI generation from visual input, and multi-agent orchestration, and ships under the K2 line's modified MIT license with self-hosting permitted.

Benchmark results

SWE-bench VerifiedCoding · #4 of 33~82.5%

Where it shines

Coding quality competitive with closed flagships
Dramatic cost advantage over US frontier APIs
Multimodal: turns designs and screenshots into working UI
Open weights under a permissive modified-MIT license

Alternatives to Kimi K2.6

Qwen3-Max

Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.

GPT-5.5

OpenAI's flagship reasoning model with a 1M-token context window, built for hard coding, science and long-horizon agentic work.

Gemini 3 Pro

Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the Kimi K2.6 API cost?: Kimi K2.6 costs $0.95 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $15.50.
What is the context window of Kimi K2.6?: Kimi K2.6 supports a context window of 262,144 tokens (262K), with up to 262K output tokens per response.
Is Kimi K2.6 open source?: Yes — Kimi K2.6 is an open-weights model released under the Modified MIT license, so it can be downloaded and self-hosted.
What are the best alternatives to Kimi K2.6?: The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.