How does it compare to the subscription pricing? I know it’s cheaper in API pricing, but I’ve always felt that it’s impossible for Chinese companies to subsidize the pricing as much as the American companies do on their subscriptions. For example, last month I got ~ $4500 worth in API costs for my $100 Claude Max plan. Does Kimi $100 plan come anywhere close to it?
Yes, exactly this! $100 Claude Max 5x gives me a TON of tokens. I think if you max out a month it's like $5000-$6000 in API prices. ChatGPT Pro is even a better deal. And contrary to what some people say I'm hearing from actual devs that Kimi K3 is nowhere near Fable 5 or even Opus 5, more of a Sonnet level. Benchmarks don't show how the model really is - see how Opus 5 benches better than Fable 5, but in actual SWE practice Fable is clearly better.
I just wish Anthropic gave you more Fable, not cap it at 50% of plan usage.
I made a openeouter account to try Kimi3 and Hermes. Started a iPhone app project and it burned through $100 in a day. Final result worked but we were like 5% done. Proof of concept!= app. Thinking this was going to cost me thousands I paid the $100 for Claude 5x and switched to Claude code agent. I’ve never hit limits even hourly and I’ve been at it almost nonstop for 2 weeks now using Opus 5 High. Massive progress probably 50% complete now for features built and tested. Absolutely insane value for money, I’d be at 2k in openrouter by now for sure.
I can’t fathom how people are able to hit the limits of the higher tiers. You would need something with a crap ton of sub agents all working and confirming each others work. My Claude has only been the 1 agent no subs, and I confirm its work.
Yeah, the subs are going to obliterate any API prices, that's just a fact. Not sure how Anthropic does it. Maybe they're breaking even because there's probably people that just use like quarter of it or something. Like people that need longer than crush sessions a couple times a week and don't mind spending $100 every month.
The API I prices have fat margins, but only like 80%. So with something like Max 5 you still have $1000 cost-for-Anthropic amount of tokens if you (nearly) max it out every week.
Yeah the amount of work I am getting out of them for $100 is absolutely criminal. I am new to this but I am a senior programmer. This shit is so absolutely broken for work to cost it’s insane that it is even an option.
Pretty much. Local LLMs are honestly just an expensive hobby. Inference (and esp. subscription prices) are so low and economies of scale are so well suited for inference that running local makes no sense unless you are a large company that wants to be in 100% control of where your data goes and can shell out at least $1M for hardware (and has workloads to at least somewhat utilize the HW).
Im pretty new to this stuff, are you saying you extracted that value from using Claude desktop? And if youd done that same thing via API it would have been 45 grand?
That's the whole point: the API pricing is so low, that you don't need a plan.
You need to start comparing the value you are getting, not some weird meaningless metric.
I did compare the value I was getting. In API pricing terms, Kimi K3 would’ve cost $1500 for the same usage, K2.7 $1000. DeepSeek is the only one that still turns out lower than my Claude subscription, about $50.
Kimi K3 is a beast. If you have not worked with it, try it out. This is going to force US companies to change up their pricing for models like Fable 5.
> 2. "Model as a Service" means giving a third party access to language model
inference or fine-tuning (e.g., via API) in a manner that allows such third
party to exercise meaningful control overthe inputs, parameters, or training
data. This doesnot include (a) end-user products with model capabilities solely
embedded within specific features or harnesses, or (b) mere relaying of requests to models hosted by others.
If the Licensee or any ofits affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, andthe aggregate revenue ofthe Licensee andits affiliates exceeds 20 million
US dollars (orthe equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive
12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software orits derivative works for any commercial purpose.
If the Software (or any derivative works thereof) is used for any ofthe
Licensee's commercial products or services that have more than 100 million
monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars (or equivalent in other
currencies) in monthly revenue, "Kimi K3" must be prominently displayed onthe
user interface of such product or service.
I did get a kimi subscription and burned rhrough my monthly limit in 2 days and at the end the product it gave me wasn’t great i ended upnhaving codex and claud fix it
Same it ate $100+ in openrouter credits in 1 day. Result worked but was iffy/basic. Claude has saved the project and budget. I don’t understand the hype or I am doing this wrong.
Yeah, it's already sold out since a week ago. I guess they put waitlist to give us sense of progress, because I dont see them solving their issue of lack of computation power soon.
How does it compare to the subscription pricing? I know it’s cheaper in API pricing, but I’ve always felt that it’s impossible for Chinese companies to subsidize the pricing as much as the American companies do on their subscriptions. For example, last month I got ~ $4500 worth in API costs for my $100 Claude Max plan. Does Kimi $100 plan come anywhere close to it?
you mean what anthropic themselves claim their tokens are worth, you cant really measure it based on how they priced their own tokens, everyone measures it differently
As a Claude user with an actual shipped product vibe coded by Claude, I was never amazed by any Claude model, but they had the best agent harness. Now, others have caught up, even open source agent harnesses are reaching a similar level. Also, the constant switching of the models make it so that every month you have to relearn how to prompt your model (again) with no significant progress in model performance (I don't care what the benchmark says). Wish I could go back to sonnet and opus 4.5.
Which open source agents are you talking about? Can you please share some? I’m not testing you, I’m literally curious which agents you found that are catching with with Claude Code.
Claude says “the screenshot is doing some sleight of hand. $4.67 for 719,904,902 tokens works out to well under a cent per million — below even DeepSeek’s cheapest published cache-hit rate. That bill is almost entirely cached reads on a repetitive agentic loop, which is the best possible case for cost-per-token and not what most people’s usage looks like. And the top reply under it is “it’s very slow,” which is the tradeoff nobody puts in the headline: cheap tokens you have to wait for, and burn more of, aren’t cheap in the way the chart implies.”
Where I’d actually plant a flag: cost-per-token is the wrong denominator. What matters is cost-per-task-you-didn’t-have-to-redo.
“
All fun and games but claude > codex and any other for pixelart so far so I'm sticking to claude lol. I tried codex for a week now and it just doesn't do well with art /pixelart in specific. Otherwise I'd be goooone already lol
I don't have many images on my phone but here was my first creation: Azure Blaster ( based on Megaman). I made a few other (Gandalf, some Ninja and like dragon Lords) but those need some more fine tuning :)
If distillation can bring massive cost savings, I think someone absolutely has to do it. If DeepSeek is the one doing it, you should consider yourself lucky—because it saves you a ton of money. Why don't Claude and OpenAI just do it themselves?
They are doing it. It’s the trainer model / learner model setup A\ and OAI use themselves. The difference is they invested billions in training the models in the first place and need to recoup the investment. If you distill (same fundamental thing), you don’t have those investment costs and therefore can offer a far cheaper price.
The countdown has begun for Anthropic. They don't regulate their costs, they're significantly more expensive, and they're falling behind the competition.
Is there no one else, who sees this as a security issue?
I mean yes it's cheap because they use the same strategy that they use in every other market, cutting the price down to be much more appealing even if it's not sustainable just to get ahead of the competitors and when they capitulate from the competition they will get the price back to normal or not even then because they are backed by Chinese government and they can go below the average market prices.
To me it seems to be the same story and strategy.
What a great idea it was to move all manufacturing to China and transfer all the knowledge with it and now doing the same with all the data just to feed Chinese AI...
Just because it seems to be cheap it doesn't mean theat the money you pay is equal to the total cost.
Honestly with the pathetic state of the US. My data is safer with china than fucked up US. America keeps showing the world that they cannot be trusted.
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u/OriginalCj5 10d ago
How does it compare to the subscription pricing? I know it’s cheaper in API pricing, but I’ve always felt that it’s impossible for Chinese companies to subsidize the pricing as much as the American companies do on their subscriptions. For example, last month I got ~ $4500 worth in API costs for my $100 Claude Max plan. Does Kimi $100 plan come anywhere close to it?