Moondream 3 Preview vs MoonshotAI Kimi K2 Thinking
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Moondream 3 Preview is 1.3× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Kimi K2 Thinking accepts longer prompts: 262K vs 32K tokens.
- Moondream 3 Preview is the newer model (released 2026-10-15).
| Moondream 3 Preview | Kimi K2 Thinking | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Moondream | MoonshotAI |
| Released | 2026-10-15 | 2025-11-06 |
| Input / 1M | $0.30 | $0.60 |
| Output / 1M | $2.50 | $2.50 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.15 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.85 | $1.07 |
| Context | 32K | 262K |
| Max output | 4K | 98K |
| Accepts | text, image | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $2.50 | $2.50 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.88% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | Operational |
Cost calculator
Moondream 3 Preview
$55.50 per month$1.85 per day
Kimi K2 Thinking
$73.50 per month$2.45 per day
Moondream 3 Preview saves $18.00 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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