As of August 25, 2026, Kimi K2.5 is 63% cheaper per million tokens than o3. Kimi K2.5 is $0.59 / $3.09 per million input/output tokens versus o3 at $2.00 / $8.00. Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Sources: Moonshot AI pricing (https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat); OpenAI API pricing (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing)
Kimi K2.5
Moonshot AI
Input
$0.59
Output
$3.09
o3
OpenAI
Input
$2.00
Output
$8.00
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
SWE-bench Verified. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Kimi K2.5o3Verdict
Kimi K2.5 offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 25, 2026, Kimi K2.5 is 63% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Kimi K2.5 costs $0.59 per million input tokens and $3.09 per million output tokens ($3.68 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). o3 costs $2.00 / $8.00 per million tokens ($10.00 blended). Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI API pricing is $0.59 input and $3.09 output per million tokens via Moonshot AI. o3 OpenAI API pricing is $2.00 input and $8.00 output per million tokens via OpenAI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Kimi K2.5 leads on SWE-bench Verified: Kimi K2.5 at 76.8% vs o3 at 69.1%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
Kimi K2.5 supports a 262K token context window, while o3 supports 200K tokens. Kimi K2.5 offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Kimi K2.5 leads on 13 of 17 shared benchmarks versus o3's 4 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Kimi K2.5 and o3 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Kimi K2.5 has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Kimi K2.5 through Moonshot AI and o3 through OpenAI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published Moonshot AI API pricing and OpenAI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Kimi K2.5 supports up to 262K output tokens per request, while o3 supports up to 100K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
o3 has a measured throughput of approximately 50 tokens/second. Throughput data for Kimi K2.5 is not yet available. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Kimi K2.5 or o3 from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Kimi K2.5 costs $0.59/M input and $3.09/M output. o3 costs $2.00/M input and $8.00/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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