As of August 20, 2026, Qwen3.6-27B is 77% cheaper per million tokens than Kimi K3. Kimi K3 is $3.00 / $15.00 per million input/output tokens versus Qwen3.6-27B at $0.60 / $3.60. Sources: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/
Sources: Moonshot AI pricing (https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat); Qwen pricing (https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/)
Kimi K3
Moonshot AI
Input
$3.00
Output
$15.00
Qwen3.6-27B
Qwen
Input
$0.60
Output
$3.60
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Kimi K3Qwen3.6-27BVerdict
Qwen3.6-27B offers significantly lower pricing, while Kimi K3 leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 20, 2026, Qwen3.6-27B is 77% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Qwen3.6-27B costs $0.60 per million input tokens and $3.60 per million output tokens ($4.20 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://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. 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. Qwen3.6-27B Qwen API pricing is $0.60 input and $3.60 output per million tokens via Qwen. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Kimi K3 leads on SWE-bench Verified: Kimi K3 at 93.4% vs Qwen3.6-27B at 77.2%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
Kimi K3 supports a 1M token context window, while Qwen3.6-27B supports 262K 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.
Kimi K3 leads on 12 of 13 shared benchmarks versus Qwen3.6-27B's 1 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 K3 and Qwen3.6-27B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Qwen3.6-27B 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 Qwen3.6-27B through Qwen 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 Qwen API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. 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 Qwen3.6-27B supports up to 66K 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 Qwen3.6-27B runs at 6.118078997890058 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 Qwen3.6-27B 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. Qwen3.6-27B costs $0.60/M input and $3.60/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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