As of August 20, 2026, Mistral Small is 96% cheaper per million tokens than Kimi K3. Kimi K3 is $3.00 / $15.00 per million input/output tokens versus Mistral Small at $0.20 / $0.60. Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/
Sources: Moonshot AI pricing (https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat); Mistral AI pricing (https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/)
Kimi K3
Moonshot AI
Input
$3.00
Output
$15.00
Mistral Small
Mistral
Input
$0.20
Output
$0.60
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Kimi K3Mistral SmallVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. Mistral Small has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless Kimi K3's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 20, 2026, Mistral Small is 96% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Mistral Small costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens ($0.80 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Kimi K3 costs $3.00 / $15.00 per million tokens ($18.00 blended). Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/pricing/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Kimi K3 Moonshot AI API pricing is $3.00 input and $15.00 output per million tokens via Moonshot AI. Mistral Small Mistral API pricing is $0.20 input and $0.60 output per million tokens via Mistral AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Kimi K3 has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 93.4%. Mistral Small does not have that eval on this page yet.
Kimi K3 supports a 1M token context window, while Mistral Small supports 33K tokens. Kimi K3 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.
Shared benchmark scores for Kimi K3 and Mistral Small are still limited. Check the comparison table for the evals each model has published. 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 K3 and Mistral Small are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Mistral Small 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 K3 through Moonshot AI and Mistral Small through Mistral AI 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 Mistral API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://docs.mistral.ai/platform/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 K3 supports up to 1M output tokens per request, while Mistral Small supports up to 33K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Kimi K3 runs at approximately 8.253358168863906 tokens/second while Mistral Small runs at 0.1 tokens/second. Kimi K3 is faster in raw throughput. 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 K3 or Mistral Small 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 K3 costs $3.00/M input and $15.00/M output. Mistral Small costs $0.20/M input and $0.60/M output via Mistral AI.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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