text model comparison
Kimi K3 vs Qwen3 Max Instruct
Qwen3 Max Instruct costs less than Kimi K3 at every mix of input and output — $0.49/M against $1.85/M on input and $1.95/M against $9.00/M on output — so at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month it comes to $88.00 against $365.00, a difference of $277.00, and the cheaper of the two is the one you cannot call yet. Qwen3 Max Instruct is catalogued but not currently servable — a request naming `qwen/qwen3-max-instruct` returns `no available channel` — so its figure is what it will cost once an upstream carries it, while Kimi K3 can be called today at the rate above.
Qwen3 Max Instruct is not available yet. No configured upstream serves Qwen3 Max Instruct, so a request returns no available channel. The rates below are what it will cost once an upstream carries it, not something you can spend today. Kimi K3 can be called now.
Side by side
| Kimi K3 | Qwen3 Max Instruct | |
|---|---|---|
| Our rate — input | $1.85/M | $0.49/M |
| Our rate — output | $9.00/M | $1.95/M |
| Our rate — cached input | $0.37/M | $0.10/M |
| Official rate — input | $3.00/M | $0.85/M |
| Official rate — output | $15.00/M | $3.40/M |
| Below official | 40% | 43% |
| Context window | 512K | 256K |
| Publisher | Moonshot AI | Alibaba |
| Licence | Modified MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Released | Aug 26, 2026 | Apr 29, 2026 |
| Model id | moonshotai/kimi-k3 | qwen/qwen3-max-instruct |
| Callable today | Yes | No |
What it costs, at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month
One volume, both models, this catalogue’s published rates. Your figure will differ; the arithmetic will not, and the ratio of the two columns is the part that transfers to your own numbers.
| Model | At our rates | At official rates |
|---|---|---|
| Kimi K3 | $365.00 | $600.00 |
| Qwen3 Max InstructNot servable | $88.00 | $153.00 |
At this volume Qwen3 Max Instruct is $277.00 cheaper than Kimi K3 — 76% less. That ordering holds at any ratio of input to output, because the cheaper model is cheaper on every rate rather than on one column.
Excludes cached-input savings, which on a repeated-prefix workload reduce the input side substantially. Cached rates are in the table above and on the pricing page.
When to pick each
Pick Kimi K3
- It holds 512K in one request against 256K — 2.0× wider, which decides whether a long input is one call or a map-reduce.
- It is published by Moonshot AI under the Modified MIT licence, where Qwen3 Max Instruct is Apache 2.0.
- It is callable today. Qwen3 Max Instruct is catalogued but not currently served by any upstream.
- The catalogue lists it for whole-codebase reasoning without a retrieval layer, research synthesis over hundreds of documents and complex multi-step planning agents.
Pick Qwen3 Max InstructNot servable
- It is not callable today — no configured upstream serves it, so the rate above is what it will cost rather than what you can spend.
- Input costs $0.49/M against Kimi K3's $1.85/M, which decides the bill on input-heavy work — long documents in, short answers out.
- Output costs $1.95/M against Kimi K3's $9.00/M, which is the whole bill on generation-heavy work where a short brief produces long copy.
- Cached input is $0.10/M against Kimi K3's $0.37/M, and on an agent loop the repeated prefix is most of every request.
- It is published by Alibaba under the Apache 2.0 licence, where Kimi K3 is Modified MIT.
- The catalogue lists it for products shipping into regulated or licence-sensitive contexts, multilingual applications beyond EN/ZH and jSON-mode and schema-constrained generation.
Every line above is a field in the model catalogue rather than a judgement about output quality. This site publishes no benchmark results, so which model answers your prompts better is a measurement to run on your own traffic — the same key calls both.
Questions
- Which is cheaper, Kimi K3 or Qwen3 Max Instruct?
- Qwen3 Max Instruct, at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month: $88.00 against $365.00, a difference of $277.00 — 76% less. That holds at any ratio of input to output on this pairing, because Qwen3 Max Instruct has the lower rate on every column, not just the one the headline quotes. What the arithmetic does not tell you is whether both models do your job to the same standard; that is a measurement on your own prompts, not a number we can publish.
- Can I call both Kimi K3 and Qwen3 Max Instruct today?
- Only Kimi K3. A request naming `moonshotai/kimi-k3` reaches a live upstream and is billed at the rate above; `qwen/qwen3-max-instruct` returns `no available channel`, because no configured upstream carries Qwen3 Max Instruct yet. Its rate is published because it is what the model will cost, not because you can spend it today. 7 of the 24 models in this catalogue are callable right now; the rest are listed at their intended price and marked, so you find out here rather than from an error at call time.
- How much context does Kimi K3 hold compared with Qwen3 Max Instruct?
- Kimi K3 takes 524,288 tokens (512K) in a single request against Qwen3 Max Instruct's 262,144 (256K) — 2.0× wider. The window is a cost decision before it is a capability one: an input that does not fit has to be split, summarised in pieces and summarised again, which bills the source text more than once. Below that line the wider window is capacity you are not using.
- What licences are Kimi K3 and Qwen3 Max Instruct under?
- Kimi K3 is published by Moonshot AI under Modified MIT and Qwen3 Max Instruct by Alibaba under Apache 2.0. Where one of those is a plain MIT or Apache 2.0 text and the other is a publisher's own or a modified variant, the difference is real and lives in the document rather than in the name — user thresholds, field-of-use terms and attribution requirements all appear in licences of that kind. Each model's own page carries the longer answer, and the licence text carries the binding one.
- How do I switch between Kimi K3 and Qwen3 Max Instruct?
- Change the model id and nothing else. Both are served from `https://router.xark.io/api/v1` behind the same OpenAI-compatible contract — `moonshotai/kimi-k3` and `qwen/qwen3-max-instruct` — so the request shape, the streaming frames, the usage block and the error envelope are identical between them. Send an explicit id and no substitution happens underneath you, which is what makes running both and comparing the two on your own traffic a change of one string rather than a migration. Qwen3 Max Instruct is not servable yet, so that swap is not available today.
- How do these rates compare with the official ones?
- Both rows are published side by side rather than as a single discount claim. Kimi K3 is 40% below Moonshot AI's official rate and Qwen3 Max Instruct is 43% below Alibaba's, which at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month is $365.00 against an official $600.00 for Kimi K3, and $88.00 against $153.00 for Qwen3 Max Instruct. The claim on this site is only that our rate sits below the model publisher's own — not that no one else is cheaper. Where a third-party provider undercuts us on either model, that provider's rate is printed on that model's own page.