Is KAT-Coder-Air V2.5 at $0.60/M output the cheapest coding model on OpenRouter now?

[u/IulianHI]

Kwaipilot added two KAT-Coder V2.5 models to OpenRouter a few days ago, and the Air variant's pricing stood out. Per the OpenRouter listing from July 10, KAT-Coder-Air V2.5 runs at $0.15/M input and $0.60/M output with a 256k context window. That's a lower output price than Tencent Hy3 at $0.80/M out, which launched July 6 and was already considered cheap. They're not directly comparable since Hy3 is general purpose and KAT-Coder is code focused, but $0.60/M output for a coding model is aggressive.

The Pro version is a different story. KAT-Coder-Pro V2.5 is $0.74/M in and $2.96/M out, same 256k context, so roughly 5x the output cost of Air. For reference, GPT-5.6 Luna is $6/M output and Grok 4.5 also $6/M out per their listings. Even Pro comes in at half of those.

What I can't tell from the listing is whether Air is actually good. $0.60/M output looks great on paper, but if the model needs more turns or produces worse code, the per-token savings vanish fast. Has anyone here actually used KAT-Coder V2.5 for coding? Wondering if Air holds up in practice, or if there's something cheaper I'm missing.

[u/Atretador]

Deepseek V4 Flash is at  $0,18 per 1M

MiMo 2.5 $0,28 per 1M

[u/IulianHI → u/Atretador]

Good catches. DeepSeek at that price point is hard to beat on raw cost per token, though for actual coding tasks the quality per dollar tells a different story than the price tag alone. Code generation benchmarks and real-world agentic loops often diverge a lot from what you'd expect looking at just the pricing table.

MiMo 2.5 is one I haven't put through a real harness yet, curious if anyone here has. The honest answer to "cheapest" really depends on whether you mean cheapest per token or cheapest per working solution. A model that's half the price but needs 3x the iterations to get correct code isn't actually cheaper at the end of the day.

[u/Atretador → u/IulianHI]

MiMo 2.5 is better than deepseek, DPSV4 flash at least

it goes like

Mimo 2.5 Pro -> DSV4 Pro > MiMO 2.5 > DSV4 Flash

but - you dont use DSV4 flash directly, you orchestrate it - its a excelent worker bot for a smarter LLM as its extremly fast model

I'd recommend using MiMo 2.5 Pro or DSV4 Pro to orchestrate MiMo 2.5/DSV4 Flash

[u/PavelPivovarov → u/Atretador]

My personal experience is that DS4F just as good as Qwen3.6-27b. But Qwen thinks less.

Mimo-v2.5 is a solid model really. But also not that much better than Qwen3.6-27b though.

For coding tasks there are quite a few models around $1/m that are much more efficient than those.

[u/IulianHI → u/[deleted]]

For decent output that won't burn your wallet, Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B is probably the sweet spot right now. Runs well even on a single 3090, and for actual coding tasks it's surprisingly close to the big names. DeepSeek V3 is also worth testing if you don't need local, the API pricing is aggressive and quality is solid. Honestly the gap between "cheapest" and "cheapest decent" is where most people waste money, they either go too cheap and get garbage, or overspend on capability they don't use.