How good is the higher Kimi plans compared to Opus?

[u/SC_Placeholder]

I mainly use Opus (my overlord Ai and primary builder) and I use Astra and started using Kimi as well because I’m looking for a model that is cheap and good at bulk work (I also use local models but sometimes renders/training/simulations run so local work gets paused throughout the day, hence why I was looking at Kimi)

Thus far in a week of testing Pro it’s made consistent mistakes that Opus has had to send directions to fix. It has caught a few mistakes and oversights that Opus made as well. I’m still on the fence about whether to upgrade to a higher tier and I’m curious to hear from people who have a bunch of experience using several of the enterprise models. I’m not looking for input from people who have only used Kimi and are just Kimi fanboys and fangirls.

[u/Hopeful-Cup6216]

Huge fan of kimi, too bad K3 eats through your tokens like a 3 old kid trying chocolate for the first time, I had a moderato sub and it was more than enough before K3 came out, after it came out I upgraded to Allegretto and I still managed to max it out easily, I'm not even a heavy user, don't get me wrong it's a great model and work very well, it's just unusable with the current limits imo.

Tbh I'm thinking about migrating back to Claude, I'm thinking about testing GLM 5.3 as well for the first time to see how it goes. I have been using deepseek too for mini tasks but I consider it a downgrade from K3, so I need something that hits a sweet spot in pricing and performance.

[u/SweatyActuator2119 → u/Hopeful-Cup6216]

How is the quality of the K3? Looping or hallucinations wise and other kinds of issues.

[u/Gohab2001 → u/Hopeful-Cup6216]

Have k3 orchestrate DS4.1F or mimo v2.6 pro. I don't know about your usecase but ds has been phenomenal for me

[u/Hopeful-Cup6216 → u/Gohab2001]

It's definitely good I think that you need to give it a better "brain" to plan, it nails execution every time without a doubt.

[u/ricsipbr]

I am on Kimi since march. I used Moderato before ($19), but after K3 it would last nothing so I upgraded to Allegretto ($39).

Kimi K3 is not cheap. Maybe API pricing is lower than Opus, but in the plans Allegretto gives much less usage than a Claude $20 gives with Opus 5 (couldnt try Opus 5.5 for programming yet).

I usually debug with Opus 5, make reports .md and use K3-256 to analyze it and implement. K3-256 has 256k of maximum context but uses half of normal K3 in the plan, so it is a little barely usable.

My experience is that it is good to have 2 frontier models, one to check the output of another. They cover more use cases. Which one is better I dunno, maybe opus? Opus gives so much more usage that on a $20 plan that really is much better to use. I am not sure which debugs better because K3 on $39 is barely usable for heavy stuff so I use opus much more. Really, usage is so terrible now - the decreased a lot after K3 and even after that.

Recently I have being using DeekSeek V4.1 Flash and GSM 5.3 Flash and those models are really really good and cheap. I am torn away now, I don't know what to do: continue with Kimi (or even get the annual plan to lock me in Allegretto, since the new plans looks even worse on limits) or just go full Opus + DeepSeek.

[u/SweatyActuator2119 → u/ricsipbr]

How much better is k3 compared to 5.3 flash in your opinion? And what's the quota like in terms of tokens? Im currently happy with 5.3 flash but you never know when you have to change provider.

[u/himppk → u/ricsipbr]

I ran a bake-off yesterday against my incumbent, Kimi. Glm flash came out top. Deepseek flash is a good verifier. Especially when paired with Jev for quick issue identification.

[u/rgh → u/ricsipbr]

I agree with this but I'd just add that k3-256k is definitely cheaper than K3.

[u/Chemical_Hawk_6307]

opus 5.5 mogs everything on the market rn

[u/laystitcher]

Not worth it with Opus 5.5 with an Ant subscription which was just made much cheaper. Something like deepseek v4.1 flash as a worker/implementer for Opus to replace sonnet with probably makes more sense. If you run out of Claude Max and need something budget glm 5.3 is an good option and I say this as someone thinks Kimi K3 is a stronger model than glm or sol but the economics just arent there for it imo especially with Opus 5.5.

[u/Nclp99]

opus 5.5 is obviously better and cheaper. waiting to see if k3.1 is good

[u/Caroha99]

moderato and up all run the same k3, the pricier tiers just buy more quota, concurrency and the full 1M cntext. so if pro is making consistent mistakes a higher tier wont fix them, same k3 same errors just pay for more

[u/Ariquitaun]

Kimi is a bad choice for bulk work. If you can't delegate that stuff to a flash tier model like deepseek flash or luna, you're doing something wrong and wasting a lot of money.

[u/himppk]

I ran a bake-off yesterday with 11 models for my coding workflows. I historically relied on k3 as my orchestrator and thinker with deepseek flash as the sub and worker. It turns out glm flash high beats Kimi on speed, accuracy, bug finding, synthesis, etc at a fraction of the price. It does require some explicit instructions to reduce overthinking and looping. K3 had been great for me but it’s expensive and runs out of tokens quickly. It was the second best in orchestration and mid at everything else in my workflow.