AI Daily Insights No. 77 · October 20, 2026
←Model pricing

DeepSeek vs Kimi API pricing

Checked against the official price pages on 2026-10-14

In short

At 100M input and 20M output tokens a month, the cheapest model from each is deepseek-flash (about ¥270 a month) and kimi-k2.7-code (about ¥1,190 a month). DeepSeek's entry model is cheaper; Kimi's costs about 4.4 times as much.

The most expensive from each is deepseek-v4-pro (about ¥1,080 a month) and kimi-k3 (about ¥4,000 a month). Price says nothing about whether the models are equally capable; weigh it with benchmarks and context length.

For your own usage: API cost calculator

All models

Prices are per million tokens: ¥ is CNY, $ is USD; time-of-day pricing is written peak / off-peak. Monthly cost is in CNY and assumes 100M input and 20M output tokens a month, no cache hits and half of calls at peak hours where that applies, cheapest first.

ModelInputCache hitOutputMonthly (CNY)
DeepSeekdeepseek-flash ¥2 / 1¥0.04 / 0.02¥8 / 4270
DeepSeekdeepseek-v4-pro ¥9 / 4.5¥0.3 / 0.15¥27 / 13.51,080
Kimikimi-k2.7-code ¥6.5¥1.3¥271,190
Kimikimi-k2.6 ¥6.5¥1.1¥271,190
Kimikimi-k3 ¥20¥2¥1004,000

Price changes at both vendors

  1. 2026-04-24

    DeepSeek V4-Pro launched at a list price of ¥12 input (cache miss) / ¥24 output, with a 75% launch discount (¥3 / ¥6). source

  2. 2026-04-26

    DeepSeek cut cache-hit input prices across the lineup to a tenth of launch levels: ¥0.02 for V4-Flash, ¥0.025 for V4-Pro. source

  3. 2026-05-31

    DeepSeek said V4-Pro would stay permanently at a quarter of its list price after the promotion — ¥3 input / ¥6 output (about $0.435 / $0.87). source

  4. 2026-07-16

    Kimi K3 launched (≈2.8T parameters, 1M-token context). International list price: $3 input / $15 output per million tokens (our Aug 27 issue). The China site now lists ¥20 input / ¥100 output. source · our coverage

  5. 2026-08-17

    DeepSeek introduced peak/off-peak API pricing: weekday 9:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00 Beijing time are peak; off-peak is half price. V4 Pro output ¥27 peak / ¥13.5 off-peak; V4 Flash output ¥9 / ¥4.5. source · our coverage

  6. 2026-09-10

    DeepSeek launched V4.1 Flash and said it planned to route V4 Pro requests to the new model at Flash prices. source · our coverage

  7. 2026-09-30

    Kimi K3.1 appeared on the API platform; the official price page does not list it yet. source · our coverage

Other comparisons