Kimi K3 vs Claude Sonnet 5.5
Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs less on output ($3.00 against $4.50 per million tokens); Kimi K3 costs less on input ($0.90 against $1.20). Both on one key at UplinkSwitch, each next to its developer's list price.
Prices · per million tokens, USD
| Tokens | Kimi K3kimi-k3 | Claude Sonnet 5.5claude-sonnet-5-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.90Moonshot AI lists $3.00 · 70% under | $1.20Anthropic lists $2.00 · 40% under |
| Cached input | $0.09Moonshot AI lists $0.30 · 70% under | $0.075Anthropic lists $0.10 · 25% under |
| Output | $4.50Moonshot AI lists $15.00 · 70% under | $3.00Anthropic lists $10.00 · 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 | 2026-09-28 |
| Anthropic lifecycle | — | active, retires no sooner than 2027-09-28 |
| 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 Sonnet 5.5 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 chat requests | $4.05list $13.50 | $3.90list $9.00 |
| 100 long documents | $5.40list $18.00 | $6.60list $12.00 |
| A month of both, daily | $283.50list $945.00 | $315.00list $630.00 |
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 $31.50 less here.
Same key, same URL
One base URL and one key serve both models. The request below calls Kimi K3; put claude-sonnet-5-5 in the model field to call Claude Sonnet 5.5 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 Sonnet 5.5. Pricing by family: Kimi, Claude. More comparisons: MiniMax M2.7 vs Kimi K3, Kimi K3 vs GPT-6.1 Sol, GLM 5.3 vs Kimi K3, Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs GPT-6.1 Sol.
Questions
- Which costs less, Kimi K3 or Claude Sonnet 5.5?
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs less on output ($3.00 against $4.50 per million tokens); Kimi K3 costs less on input ($0.90 against $1.20).
- 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-sonnet-5-5 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 Sonnet 5.5?
- Better depends on the job; this page compares what the catalog can measure. Claude Sonnet 5.5 costs less on output ($3.00 against $4.50 per million tokens); Kimi K3 costs less on input ($0.90 against $1.20). Kimi K3 takes 1,048,576 tokens of context against 1,000,000 for Claude Sonnet 5.5. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is the newer release. Both run on the same key, so the fair test is your own prompt sent to each model id.