Kimi Pricing (2026): Free Chat, $19 Plans, Split Ahead
Kimi starts free, paid plans run $19-$199, and Kimi Code is splitting out. See current tiers, API rates, hidden credit costs, and the best buy.
Kimi costs $0 for ordinary K2.6 chat, $19 to $199 a month for agent and Kimi Code memberships, or usage-based API rates starting at $0.16 per million cached input tokens. The best solo move is free first, one monthly paid cycle second, and annual billing only after you measure credit burn because unused credits expire and Kimi says the current Kimi plus Kimi Code bundle will split.
Kimi pricing at a glance
Kimi's best-value paid tier is Allegretto at $39 a month, but most people should start on Adagio Free or Moderato at $19. Allegro earns its $99 price when four concurrent Agent tasks or K3's one-million-token Chat capacity affect paid work. Vivace is a capacity purchase, not a default upgrade.
Every number below was verified against Kimi's pricing page, August 2026, then cross-checked against its Help Center, API documentation, and paid-services terms. USD checkout pricing can vary by region, payment channel, and tax treatment.
An Agent task is a multi-step job in Kimi's workspace, such as research, slides, or a website. Kimi labels the task counts as approximate equivalents based on typical token use, not hard coupons for a fixed number of outcomes. Longer inputs, longer outputs, and heavier tools consume more of the shared pool.
All four paid tiers get 4x Agent queue priority. The important upgrade differences are credit quantity, concurrency, Kimi Code allocation, Claw access, and long-context access. Buying a higher tier for a feature you will not use turns capacity into waste at the next monthly reset.
- K2.6 Chat has a useful $0 path that does not consume membership credits.
- Paid pricing starts one dollar below ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro on monthly billing.
- Every consumer tier has a clearly published annual total and savings amount.
- Kimi currently bundles workspace Agents and Kimi Code under one paid membership.
- Agent task counts are estimates, not guaranteed deliverables.
- Every paid feature draws from one expiring monthly credit pool.
- Kimi Code adds its own 5-hour and weekly limits on top of shared credits.
- Kimi has announced that Kimi and Kimi Code benefits will move into separate plans, without publishing the replacement prices yet.
Is Kimi free?
Yes, Kimi is free for ordinary K2.6 Chat, and that chat use does not consume membership credits. A person who mainly asks questions, drafts documents, summarizes material, or gets occasional coding help may never need to pay.
The free Adagio tier also gives a narrow Agent preview: one concurrent Agent task and two active scheduled tasks. It stops before the features that make Kimi a persistent work system. Adagio includes no Kimi Code quota, Agent Swarm, Kimi Claw, or database-backed website deployment.
The boundary is easy to miss because K2.6 appears in more than one surface. Kimi's credit rules say K2.6 in Chat is free, while K2.6 used as an Agent inside Kimi Work consumes membership credits. The same model name does not mean the same meter.
Who never needs to pay? Stay free when Chat completes the outcome and the Adagio Agent limits do not interrupt revenue-producing work. A founder who uses Kimi for three document summaries and a few questions each week has no economic reason to subscribe. A developer who wants Kimi Code in a terminal, or an operator who schedules recurring research and launches parallel Agent tasks, has crossed into paid capacity.
Allegretto is the best paid Kimi plan for most regular users
Allegretto offers the strongest unit economics at $39 a month because its larger credit pool costs less per approximate Agent task than the tiers above or below it. Moderato remains the safer first purchase. Allegro and Vivace solve specific capacity problems.
Moderato is the one-month validation tier
Moderato costs $19 monthly or $180 upfront for a year. Its roughly 60 reference Agent tasks work out to about $0.32 each on monthly billing or $0.25 each on annual billing. That is not a per-task invoice rate. It is a way to normalize Kimi's own approximate task allowance.
Choose Moderato when you need Kimi Code, faster Agent execution, or more recurring work than Adagio can support, but you have no usage history. Two concurrent Agent tasks are enough for a solo professional who wants one job running while another is prepared. Skip it when K2.6 Chat already finishes the job.
Allegretto is the value winner
Allegretto costs $39 monthly or $372 annually and raises the approximate Agent allowance from 60 to 150. That is about $0.26 per reference task monthly or $0.21 annually, the lowest normalized rate in the paid lineup.
The step from Moderato costs another $20 a month and adds roughly 90 reference tasks, or about $0.22 per incremental task. It also moves Kimi Code credits from 1x to 5x and adds Kimi Claw. A solo developer or operator who repeatedly exhausts Moderato can justify that upgrade without jumping to a three-figure plan.
Allegretto still allows only two concurrent Agent tasks. If your bottleneck is parallelism rather than total monthly work, buying more credits will not remove it.
Allegro is the concurrency and long-context tier
Allegro costs $99 monthly or $948 annually. The extra $60 over Allegretto buys roughly 210 more reference Agent tasks, which is about $0.29 per incremental task, plus four concurrent Agent tasks and K3 Chat capacity up to one million tokens.
One million tokens is useful when a conversation must hold a large codebase or a document-heavy research trail. It is not a reason to pay $60 more for short chats. A mid-market technical lead coordinating several long-running tasks can use the concurrency. A solo writer asking ordinary questions cannot.
Vivace is only for measured heavy use
Vivace costs $199 monthly or $1,908 annually. It doubles Allegro's approximate Agent capacity from 360 to 720 for another $100, about $0.28 per incremental task, and raises Kimi Code credits from 15x to 30x. It does not improve the four-task Agent concurrency ceiling.
That makes the decision blunt: buy Vivace after Allegro's pool repeatedly runs out, or when the larger Kimi Code and professional-database allowances have a known payback. Do not buy it in anticipation of future use. A quiet month erases the unused allowance.
Annual billing saves 21.1%, but the bundle is changing
Every annual consumer plan cuts the cost of twelve monthly payments by about 21.1%. The savings range from $48 a year on Moderato to $480 on Vivace. The arithmetic is clean; the product transition is not.
Kimi's purchase page currently says that new membership plans are coming, Kimi and Kimi Code benefits will be separated, existing subscribers are unaffected, and the current bundle can still be purchased before launch. The replacement prices and exact split are not published.
That announcement changes the annual decision. A current subscriber who depends on both products may value keeping the bundled terms through the paid period. A new buyer still lacks evidence about monthly credit burn, so one monthly cycle is the safer first move. Kimi's paid-services agreement says current-period core benefits should not be harmed by a plan split and provides a cancellation or refund path for materially adverse changes, but it does not make an unused annual commitment refundable by default.
Kimi's hidden costs live in the credit rules
Kimi's biggest hidden cost is capacity that disappears or drains while you are not watching. The $19 sticker is only the subscription line. Shared credits, idle cloud services, Extra Usage, and refund limits determine the operating cost.
All membership features draw from one pool: Agent, Deep Research, Slides, Docs, Sheets, Kimi Code, Kimi Work, and Kimi Claw. Credits refresh on the subscription anniversary each month, including for annual buyers. Unused credits expire, do not roll over, and do not convert to cash.
Kimi's rough free-tier guide shows why task counts vary. A simple slide deck can consume about 1% to 2% of the pool, a deep-research report about 5% to 10%, and a code snippet about 0.5% to 2%. A month full of research is not equivalent to a month full of short code questions.
Idle services keep consuming credits
A deployed Kimi Claw cloud host consumes about 0.6% of membership credits per day, even when it is not actively running a task. Left up for 30 days, that is about 18% of the monthly pool before useful work. Delete the cloud host after saving needed files if you are not using it.
A website published through Kimi Agent consumes about 0.08% per day to stay online. Over 30 days, that is roughly 2.4% of the monthly pool. Unpublish dormant sites instead of treating deployment as a free permanent host.
Extra Usage is a prepaid overage wallet
Kimi Extra Usage keeps paid subscribers working after subscription credits run out or a rate limit blocks the included pool. Kimi spends subscription credits first, then deducts overflow from the shared USD wallet across web, browser extension, desktop, and mobile.
The vendor's examples price a simple song recommendation at about $0.005 and a detailed one-week California road-trip plan at about $0.24. Those are examples, not fixed outcome prices. Different tasks and models can cost different amounts.
The wallet requires a $10 minimum top-up. It allows up to 10 recharges per day, $1,000 in cumulative daily recharges, and a $2,000 balance. An optional monthly spending cap exists, but it is disabled by default. Enable it before giving an Agent a long-running objective.
Extra Usage funds do not expire, which is better than membership credits. The tradeoff is refundability: top-ups are generally non-refundable, non-transferable, and not redeemable for cash. Free users cannot buy Extra Usage without first becoming subscribers.
Membership refunds are narrow
Kimi's Paid Services Agreement treats an activated membership as consumed and generally non-refundable and non-transferable except where law requires otherwise. Purchases through an app store follow that store's review process. Cancelling auto-renewal stops the next charge while preserving benefits through the current paid period.
The practical protection is reversibility: start monthly, turn on the Extra Usage cap, remove idle deployments, and cancel renewal as soon as the plan no longer pays.
Kimi Code is included now; API usage is separate
Kimi Code currently starts with the $19 Moderato membership, while Kimi's model APIs are billed separately by tokens. Do not treat a membership login as prepaid API credit.
All paid members get Kimi K2.7 Code. Moderato and above can select Kimi K3, and Allegretto and above receive K3's full one-million-token context plus the K2.7 Code HighSpeed tier inside Kimi Code. Requests across the command-line tool, editor integrations, and compatible third-party agents share the plan quota.
The published usage envelope spans roughly 300 to 1,200 requests in a rolling five-hour window and up to 30 concurrent requests, depending on plan and workload, plus a weekly quota that refreshes every seven days. Those counts do not cancel the shared membership meter. Kimi Code also draws from the common pool and carries its own 5-hour and weekly rate limits.
The plan split matters most here. Kimi says Kimi Code and general Kimi benefits will be separated in forthcoming plans. Anyone budgeting a coding workflow should capture the current subscription terms and avoid projecting today's bundle indefinitely. For capability and production-risk context beyond price, see the current Kimi K3 review.
Current Kimi API rates
The cheapest general Kimi API input is K2.6 at $0.16 per million cached input tokens, $0.95 per million uncached input tokens, and $4 per million output tokens. Its context window is 262,144 tokens.
K2.7 Code costs $0.19 cached input, $0.95 uncached input, and $4 output per million tokens, also with a 262,144-token context. The HighSpeed variant doubles those rates to $0.38, $1.90, and $8.
K3 costs $0.30 cached input, $3 uncached input, and $15 output per million tokens. It carries the largest context window at 1,048,576 tokens. API prices exclude applicable taxes.
The rate card is easier to understand as an outcome budget. Assume 100 calls, each with 50,000 input tokens and 5,000 output tokens:
- K2.7 Code costs $6.75 when all input misses cache and $2.95 when all input hits cache.
- K3 costs $22.50 when all input misses cache and $9.00 when all input hits cache.
Those are two endpoints, not a promise that every request fully hits or misses. A mixed workload lands between them. Stable system instructions, repository context, or repeated documents create more cache value; constantly changing prefixes create less.
At that assumed workload, a $19 subscription sticker equals about 281 uncached or 644 cached K2.7 Code API calls, and about 84 uncached or 211 cached K3 calls. This is a directional comparison only. Membership buys an interface, Agent features, and included quotas; API spend buys programmatic model calls.
The output bill becomes dominant as caching improves. In the cached K3 example, $7.50 of the $9 total comes from output. Cutting repeated input helps, but shorter accepted answers and fewer retries often matter more than chasing a perfect cache-hit rate.
Kimi Business starts at $3,000 a year
Kimi Business costs $600 per seat per year, about $50 per seat-month, with a five-seat minimum and a $3,000 annual starting bill. It is a governance purchase before it is a discount.
At five seats, annual personal memberships cost $900 on Moderato, $1,860 on Allegretto, $4,740 on Allegro, or $9,540 on Vivace. Business is $2,100 above five Moderato seats and $1,140 above five Allegretto seats, but $1,740 below five Allegro seats.
That creates a clear rule. Stay on personal Moderato or Allegretto seats when each person can manage an account and you do not need company controls. Business becomes rational when the alternative is several Allegro-class seats, or when centralized management, workspace separation, dedicated support, and Kimi's no-training-on-company-content default justify the premium.
Business includes up to one-million-token conversations, Kimi Work, Swarm, Dashboard, Plugins, and Kimi Code. Web and desktop support the enterprise workspace; the mobile app currently supports personal membership only. A team that works mainly on mobile should treat that as a blocking limitation, not a small footnote.
Kimi costs slightly less than ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro
Kimi Moderato is the cheapest annual entry among the three: $180 a year, compared with $200 for Claude Pro and $240 for twelve monthly ChatGPT Plus charges. The maximum gap is $60 a year, too small to rescue the wrong workflow.
ChatGPT Plus costs $20 a month, does not offer annual billing, and bills API usage separately.
Kimi saves $1 in a month or $60 across a year against ChatGPT Plus. In exchange, Kimi asks you to manage a shared credit pool and an approaching product split. ChatGPT's lack of annual billing costs more over twelve months but keeps the decision reversible every month.
Claude Pro costs $20 monthly or $200 annually and also bills API usage separately.
Kimi saves $20 a year against annual Claude Pro. That is less than two dollars a month. Choose between them on whether Kimi's Agent, Kimi Code, and long-context workflow replaces enough other work to matter, not on the price difference.
For a search-first alternative, Perplexity pricing starts at the same $20 monthly neighborhood but solves a different job. A pricing comparison is useful only after the job is named: chat, coding, source-backed research, automated API work, or governed team access.
How much is Kimi per month?
Kimi costs $0 on Adagio. Paid consumer memberships cost $19 for Moderato, $39 for Allegretto, $99 for Allegro, and $199 for Vivace each month. Annual billing lowers the effective monthly prices to $15, $31, $79, and $159.
Is Kimi totally free?
K2.6 Chat is free for all users and does not consume membership credits. The free Adagio tier has one concurrent Agent task and two scheduled tasks, but no Kimi Code, Swarm, Claw, or database website deployment.
What is the price of Kimi Premium?
Kimi does not currently sell a plan literally named Premium. Its paid consumer tiers are Moderato at $19, Allegretto at $39, Allegro at $99, and Vivace at $199 per month.
How much does Kimi Code cost?
Kimi Code is currently included with paid membership starting at $19 a month, subject to shared credits plus 5-hour and weekly limits. K2.7 Code API usage is separate at $0.19 cached input, $0.95 uncached input, and $4 output per million tokens. Kimi has announced that Kimi and Kimi Code benefits will be separated in forthcoming plans.
Does Kimi offer a student discount?
Kimi does not publish a standing student discount on its live membership pricing or Help Center pages as of 17 August 2026. Students who only need ordinary K2.6 Chat can use the $0 tier; paid buyers can use the same annual rates available to everyone.
What is Kimi's refund policy?
Activated paid services are generally non-refundable and non-transferable except where law requires otherwise. Extra Usage top-ups are also generally non-refundable. App-store purchases follow the store's refund review, and cancelling auto-renewal preserves access through the current paid period.
Did Kimi pricing change in 2026?
The current USD prices remain $19, $39, $99, and $199 monthly. Kimi has announced a structure change rather than replacement prices: general Kimi and Kimi Code benefits will move into separate plans, with existing subscribers described as unaffected.
The Monday move: buy one reversible month
Do not start with an annual Kimi plan. Start with the meter that matches the work, then make the commitment from observed usage.
Keep chat on Free
Use Adagio when K2.6 Chat completes the job. Record every time a missing Agent, Code, or concurrency feature blocks paid work.
Buy one paid month
Choose Moderato for a first Agent or Kimi Code month. Move to Allegretto only after the 60-task reference allowance, 1x Code credits, or lack of Claw becomes the repeated constraint.
Put automation on a capped API budget
Use K2.7 Code for coding automation or K3 for the one-million-token route. Set a monthly cap, record cache-hit input, output, retries, and accepted outcomes, then compare cost per accepted result.
Use Business for governance
Budget at least $3,000 a year for five seats. Buy it for company controls, workspace isolation, support, and data handling, or when five Allegro-level personal subscriptions would cost more.
After one cycle, annual billing is easy to judge. If the plan saved more than it cost, the 21.1% discount is useful. If credits expired unused or an idle deployment consumed the pool, a larger annual plan would magnify the mistake.
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Aug 17, 2026
