MoonshotAI Kimi K2 Thinking vs Qwen3.8 27B
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
- Qwen3.8 27B is 3.1× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Qwen3.8 27B accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 262K tokens.
- Qwen3.8 27B is the newer model (released 2026-08-14).
| Kimi K2 Thinking | Qwen3.8 27B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | MoonshotAI | Qwen |
| Released | 2025-11-06 | 2026-08-14 |
| Input / 1M | $0.60 | $0.039 |
| Output / 1M | $2.50 | $1.25 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.15 | $0.0039 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $1.07 | $0.342 |
| Context | 262K | 1M |
| Max output | 98K | 66K |
| Accepts | text | text, image, video |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 21 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $2.50 | $1.25 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | Operational |
Cost calculator
Kimi K2 Thinking
$73.50 per month$2.45 per day
Qwen3.8 27B
$21.09 per month$0.70 per day
Qwen3.8 27B saves $52.41 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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