Kimi K3 vs Claude Opus 5
Kimi K3 costs less on both: $0.90 in and $4.50 out per million tokens, against $1.50 in and $7.50 out for Claude Opus 5. Both on one key at UplinkSwitch, each next to its developer's list price.
Prices · per million tokens, USD
| Tokens | Kimi K3kimi-k3 | Claude Opus 5claude-opus-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.90Moonshot AI lists $3.00 · 70% under | $1.50Anthropic lists $5.00 · 70% under |
| Cached input | $0.09Moonshot AI lists $0.30 · 70% under | $0.15Anthropic lists $0.50 · 70% under |
| Output | $4.50Moonshot AI lists $15.00 · 70% under | $7.50Anthropic lists $25.00 · 70% under |
| Context window | 1,048,576 tokens | 1,000,000 tokens |
| Max output | 1,048,576 tokens | 128,000 tokens |
| Input | text, image, video | text, image |
| Released | 2026-07-16 | 2026-07-24 |
| Anthropic lifecycle | — | active, retires no sooner than 2027-07-24 |
| Formats | OpenAI SDK | Anthropic SDK, OpenAI SDK |
| Developer | Moonshot AI | Anthropic |
List price: each developer's published rate, read October 2026. A model with no cached rate bills cached tokens at its input rate. Live from GET https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/catalog. Lifecycle from Anthropic's model deprecations, read 2026-10-19.
What the same work costs · USD, here and at list
| Work | Kimi K3 | Claude Opus 5 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 chat requests | $4.05list $13.50 | $6.75list $22.50 |
| 100 long documents | $5.40list $18.00 | $9.00list $30.00 |
| A month of both, daily | $283.50list $945.00 | $472.50list $1,575.00 |
A chat request is 2,000 input and 500 output tokens; a long document is 50,000 in and 2,000 out; the month is 1,000 chats and 100 documents a day for 30 days, uncached. Over that month Kimi K3 costs $189.00 less here.
Newest in the line
- Claude Opus 5.5 is the newest in Claude Opus 5's line: $2.10 in and $6.00 out per million tokens here, against $4.00 and $20.00 at list.
Same key, same URL
One base URL and one key serve both models. The request below calls Kimi K3; put claude-opus-5 in the model field to call Claude Opus 5 instead.
shell
curl https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/chat/completions \
-H "authorization: Bearer sk-uplink-live-..." \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"kimi-k3","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}]}'Model pages: Kimi K3, Claude Opus 5. Pricing by family: Kimi, Claude. More comparisons: Kimi K3 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5, MiniMax M2.7 vs Kimi K3, Kimi K3 vs GPT-6.1 Sol, GLM 5.3 vs Kimi K3.
Questions
- Which costs less, Kimi K3 or Claude Opus 5?
- Kimi K3 costs less on both: $0.90 in and $4.50 out per million tokens, against $1.50 in and $7.50 out for Claude Opus 5.
- Can I switch between them by changing the model id?
- Yes. Both answer in the OpenAI SDK format at the same base URL with the same key. Change the model id from kimi-k3 to claude-opus-5 and nothing else.
- Is there a subscription?
- No. Prepaid credit from $10, with no subscription or monthly fee. Each top-up locks your prices for 30 days.
- Is Kimi K3 better than Claude Opus 5?
- Better depends on the job; this page compares what the catalog can measure. Kimi K3 costs less on both: $0.90 in and $4.50 out per million tokens, against $1.50 in and $7.50 out for Claude Opus 5. Kimi K3 takes 1,048,576 tokens of context against 1,000,000 for Claude Opus 5. Claude Opus 5 is the newer release. Both run on the same key, so the fair test is your own prompt sent to each model id.