The headline cost gap is 3× on output
Kimi K3 at $4.00 input / $18.00 output per 1M tokens versus Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B at $2.00 / $6.00. On a 1:3 input:output workload the blended rate is $14.50 on Kimi K3 against $5.00 on A95B — A95B is 66% cheaper on the same workload. On a 1:9 long-output workload the gap is also 66% ($5.60 vs $16.60).
| Workload (input:output) | Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B | Kimi K3 | Saving on A95B |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1:1 (chat-shaped) | $4.00 / 1M blended | $11.00 / 1M blended | 64% |
| 1:3 (agent-shaped) | $5.00 / 1M blended | $14.50 / 1M blended | 66% |
| 1:9 (long-output) | $5.60 / 1M blended | $16.60 / 1M blended | 66% |
| Input only (rerank / classify) | $2.00 / 1M | $4.00 / 1M | 50% |
| Output only (synthesis) | $6.00 / 1M | $18.00 / 1M | 67% |
Both are open-weight frontier MoE checkpoints
Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B: 2.4T total parameters, 95B active per token, 262K native context extensible to 1M via YaRN, qwen3.8-max license. Kimi K3: published by Moonshot AI with a 1M-token context window, Moonshot's published Kimi K3 license. Both route through OneInfer via OpenAI-compatible endpoints. Both ship open weights.
No published same-harness benchmark table
Neither Moonshot nor Alibaba publishes a shared benchmark table running Kimi K3 and A95B on the same harness. A95B scores 86.6 on Terminal Bench 2.1, 92.6 on GPQA Diamond, 67.7 on SWE-bench Pro, 73.5 on FrontierSWE — all on Qwen's published harnesses. Kimi K3's published scores are on Moonshot's own eval harness. State the absence before quoting any side-by-side number.
When to pick Kimi K3
- You specifically want Moonshot's published Kimi K3 license terms over the qwen3.8-max license.
- You have a workload that has been pre-tuned on Kimi K3 and a switch is more costly than the 3× output premium.
- You are running inference on hardware or a serving stack that has been benchmarked against Kimi K3 already.
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When to pick A95B
- Per-token cost dominates the buying decision. Output-heavy workloads in particular.
- You are running workloads where 262K native / 1M extended context is required and YaRN extension is acceptable.
- You want the Qwen vendor benchmark record reproduced on Anthropic / OpenAI / Google frontier harnesses.
Caveats
- Kimi K3's published license is Moonshot's Kimi K3 license, not Apache or MIT. Read the license tag on the official Hugging Face repository before self-hosting at scale.
- Cache-read rates for Kimi K3 are not consistently published; the headline rates above are uncached.
- A95B requires thinking mode on every call. Kimi K3 has not been documented as requiring thinking mode.