Kimi K3 API: Pricing & Access Guide (2026)

Moonshot AI's Kimi line has become a quiet favorite among agent builders. Kimi K3 is the flagship: built for long-horizon agentic work, strong at maintaining coherence over hundreds of tool calls, and competitive with frontier models on coding evals.

Kimi pricing on NovAI (verified August 2026)

Model	In / Out per 1M	Best for
kimi-k3	$2.90 / $14.50	Long agent runs, hard coding tasks
kimi-k2.7-code	$0.67 / $3.40	Everyday coding agents — best value
kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed	$2.07 / $8.61	Latency-critical coding (IDE autocomplete)
kimi-k2.6	$0.95 / $4.00	General chat + tool use
kimi-k2.5	$0.60 / $3.00	Budget general-purpose

Where K3 shines

• Long-horizon agents: K3 holds plan coherence across 100+ step tool chains better than any sub-$15 model we've tested.
• Repo-scale edits: multi-file refactors with consistent cross-file reasoning.
• Search-augmented answers: strong at integrating many retrieved snippets.

The access problem (and the fix)

Moonshot's console requires Chinese phone verification and local payment. NovAI resells the full Kimi line behind one OpenAI-compatible key:

curl https://aiapi-pro.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_NOVAI_KEY" \
  -d '{"model":"kimi-k3","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Plan a 20-step refactor..."}]}'

Which Kimi tier to pick

1. IDE / autocomplete: kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed.
2. Coding agents: start on kimi-k2.7-code; escalate stuck tasks to K3.
3. Everything else: kimi-k2.5/k2.6 is honestly enough for chat and tool use.