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Is the price here correct? https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2-thinking Would be $0,60 for input and $2,50 for 1 million output tokens. If the model is really that good it's 4x cheaper than comparable models. It's hosted at a loss or the others have a huge margin? I might miss something here. Would love some expert opinion :)

FYI: the non thinking variant has the same price.



In short, the others have a huge margin if you ignore training costs. See https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... for details.


Somehow that article totally ignored the insane pricing of cached input tokens set by Anthropic and OpenAI. For agentic coding, typically 90~95% of the inference cost is attributed to cached input tokens, and a scrappy China company can do it almost for free: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news0802


It uses 75% linear attention layers so it is inherently lower cost. And it is MOE so active parameters are far lower.


Yes, you may consider that opensource models hosted over Openrouter are charging about bare hardware costs, where in practice some providers there may run on subsidized hardware even, so there is money to be made.




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