If you want the Kimi K2.6 price, the only source worth quoting is Moonshot's own pricing page. Everything else is secondhand.
As of April 21, 2026, Moonshot's K2.6 pricing page reads:
- Input Price (Cache Hit): $0.16 / 1M tokens
- Input Price (Cache Miss): $0.95 / 1M tokens
- Output Price: $4.00 / 1M tokens
- Context Window: 262,144 tokens
And for comparison, K2.5 on the matching pricing page:
- Input Price (Cache Hit): $0.10 / 1M tokens
- Input Price (Cache Miss): $0.60 / 1M tokens
- Output Price: $3.00 / 1M tokens
- Context Window: 262,144 tokens
So the real question isn't "is K2.6 cheap?" It's three separate ones: how much more expensive it is than K2.5, whether that premium is worth it for your workload, and what changes once caching is in the picture.
New to Kimi K2.6? Try Kimi K2.6.
Kimi K2.6 Pricing at a Glance
| Model | Cache Hit Input | Cache Miss Input | Output | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kimi K2.5 | $0.10 | $0.60 | $3.00 | 262,144 |
| Kimi K2.6 | $0.16 | $0.95 | $4.00 | 262,144 |
How Much More Expensive Is K2.6 than K2.5?
On fresh (non-cached) input, K2.5 is $0.60/1M and K2.6 is $0.95/1M — about 58% more expensive on K2.6.
On cache-hit input, K2.5 is $0.10/1M and K2.6 is $0.16/1M, which works out to roughly the same relative bump — about 60% more.
Output tokens are where it narrows: K2.5 at $3.00/1M vs K2.6 at $4.00/1M, or about 33% more on K2.6.
Practical Cost Examples
Example 1: 1M fresh input + 200K output
K2.5
- Input: $0.60
- Output: 0.2 × $3.00 = $0.60
- Total: $1.20
K2.6
- Input: $0.95
- Output: 0.2 × $4.00 = $0.80
- Total: $1.75
Example 2: 10M fresh input + 2M output
K2.5
- Input: 10 × $0.60 = $6.00
- Output: 2 × $3.00 = $6.00
- Total: $12.00
K2.6
- Input: 10 × $0.95 = $9.50
- Output: 2 × $4.00 = $8.00
- Total: $17.50
That's a real bump, yes, but it's still nowhere near what you'd pay on frontier proprietary premium models like Claude Opus 4.7.
What You Actually Get for the K2.6 Premium
Moonshot's K2.6 docs are pretty consistent about where the extra spend is supposed to go — stronger long-horizon coding stability, better instruction following, better self-correction, and better autonomous agent execution.
So the right way to read K2.6 pricing is: you're paying for higher-end coding and agent reliability, not for a bigger context window. That distinction actually matters. Both K2.5 and K2.6 have the same 256K context. The premium here is about the quality of long-running work, not raw window size.
What Else the K2.6 Pricing Page Confirms
The K2.6 pricing page also spells out that K2.6 supports automatic context caching, ToolCalls, JSON Mode, Partial Mode, and internet search.
Worth paying attention to, because cost isn't just the per-token number. It's how well the model maps onto your actual production surface. If your app leans on long-running coding loops, structured outputs, tool calling, or repeated shared context, K2.6's higher unit price may still turn into the cheaper system-level choice once you factor in fewer retries, fewer failed runs, and less human cleanup.
One Important Pricing Footnote: Batch API
Moonshot's current Batch API pricing page says, very clearly: Batch API currently only supports kimi-k2.5.
That's significant, because it means the cheapest "high-volume, not real-time" path still belongs to K2.5.
So if your workload is asynchronous, high-volume, and doesn't care much about latency, K2.5 may still be the better cost choice — even if K2.6 is the better model on a per-call basis.
Should You Pay More for K2.6?
K2.6 is the right call when your workload is coding-heavy, when long-running agent execution quality matters, when fewer retries and better follow-through matter more than the absolute cheapest token rate, or when you're building something new and want Moonshot's current flagship.
K2.5 is the right call if cost sensitivity is your top priority, if Batch API is part of your pipeline, if your K2.5 workflow is already stable, or if you don't need the long-horizon coding upgrade badly enough to justify the premium.
Final Verdict
K2.6 costs more than K2.5. That part isn't complicated.
The numbers are $0.16 cache-hit input, $0.95 cache-miss input, and $4.00 output. The real question is whether the upgrade buys something useful for your workload: better long-horizon coding, better instruction following, more reliable agent execution.
If you want the lowest Moonshot bill, K2.5 still wins. If you care more about the quality of each run, K2.6 is the model Moonshot is clearly pushing as the new default.