As of August 20, 2026, Laguna XS 2.1 is 70% cheaper per million tokens than Kimi K2 Instruct. Kimi K2 Instruct is $0.50 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Laguna XS 2.1 at $0.10 / $0.20. Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://poolside.ai
Sources: Moonshot AI pricing (https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat); Poolside pricing (https://poolside.ai)
Kimi K2 Instruct
Moonshot AI
Input
$0.50
Output
$0.50
Laguna XS 2.1
Poolside
Input
$0.10
Output
$0.20
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Kimi K2 InstructLaguna XS 2.1Verdict
Laguna XS 2.1 offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 20, 2026, Laguna XS 2.1 is 70% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Laguna XS 2.1 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens ($0.30 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Kimi K2 Instruct costs $0.50 / $0.50 per million tokens ($1.00 blended). Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://poolside.ai. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Kimi K2 Instruct Moonshot AI API pricing is $0.50 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via Moonshot AI. Laguna XS 2.1 Poolside API pricing is $0.10 input and $0.20 output per million tokens via Poolside. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Laguna XS 2.1 leads on SWE-bench Verified: Kimi K2 Instruct at 43.8% vs Laguna XS 2.1 at 70.9%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
Kimi K2 Instruct supports a 200K token context window, while Laguna XS 2.1 supports 262K tokens. Laguna XS 2.1 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.
Laguna XS 2.1 leads on 3 of 3 shared benchmarks versus Kimi K2 Instruct's 0 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 Instruct and Laguna XS 2.1 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Laguna XS 2.1 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 Instruct through Moonshot AI and Laguna XS 2.1 through Poolside 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 Poolside API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://poolside.ai. 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 Instruct supports up to 200K output tokens per request, while Laguna XS 2.1 supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Neither Kimi K2 Instruct nor Laguna XS 2.1 has published throughput data on this page yet. 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 Instruct or Laguna XS 2.1 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 Instruct costs $0.50/M input and $0.50/M output. Laguna XS 2.1 costs $0.10/M input and $0.20/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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