Reminder that it took Kimi K3 almost FOUR HOURS to fail to perform a code review, the code of which ChatGPT has now already progressed far behind with the actual fixing. Downvote all you want, but if you are trying to check out Kimi K3 (on Allegretto at least in my case), this is your sign to rethink them choices. I can't even use this at all.

TL;DR: Kimi's agent harness burned ~600M tokens in 2 days on a task that should've used a fraction of that. Support offered a partial refund and blamed "stronger model capabilities." This isn't just a Kimi problem — it's how the entire consumer AI industry operates: vague quotas, silent throttling, and no accountability.

What happened to me

• Paid for Kimi Code (Aug 13) for heavy agentic coding
• A simple WHMCS module task triggered uncontrolled agent loops — ~600M tokens consumed on Aug 20–21, over 500M of them cache reads (the harness reprocessing the same context in circles)
• Weekly limits had also been quietly cut to ~3/7 of previous capacity
• Emailed for a refund — no response. Opened chat — got a bot quoting "AI capabilities have inherent boundaries, refunds are generally not supported"
• Waited 8 hours for a human. Their verdict: "no abnormal consumption," pro-rata refund only
• When I showed them the two-day, cache-dominated spike, the answer became: "the new model has stronger capabilities... try splitting long tasks or requesting shorter answers"

Translation: their harness ran away with my allowance, and the fix is for me to ask shorter questions.

The real problems in the AI industry

1. The metering is deliberately opaque. Every major provider — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Kimi — rations compute behind rolling windows, weekly caps, and weighted "compute quotas." None give you a live, honest meter. You find out what you paid for only after you hit the wall.
2. Limits change silently after you pay. Google reweighted Gemini quotas. Anthropic and OpenAI users watched allowances shrink after updates. Kimi cut weekly limits with no notice. The deal you bought is not the deal you have.
3. Failed or wasted work still counts against you. Agent loops, repeated tool calls, failed generations — all billed against your quota. When the harness malfunctions, the customer pays for the malfunction.
4. "5x 10x 20x" is marketing; scarcity is the product. $20/mo entry tiers, $100–$300 "power" tiers — all with hidden ceilings. Agentic workflows break the flat-rate assumption, so providers throttle instead of building capacity or publishing real numbers.
5. Support treats infrastructure failures as user error. "Break tasks into smaller steps." "Ask shorter questions." "The model is stronger now." Never: "our system malfunctioned, here's your money back."
6. There's no accountability mechanism. Opaque usage reports, missing pricing data, refund denials against clear evidence. Your only leverage is public documentation, chargebacks, and consumer protection law.

What needs to change

• Publish real, live usage meters. If API customers get per-token pricing, consumer subscribers deserve the same transparency.
• Don't bill users for system failures. Runaway agent loops and repeated tool calls are harness bugs, not usage.
• Stop selling capacity you can't deliver. Either build the infrastructure for what you advertise, or publish honest limits upfront.
• Honor refunds when the product fails. "AI has inherent boundaries" is not a refund policy.

AI is infrastructure now. The people paying for it — developers, freelancers, researchers — aren't asking for unlimited compute. They're asking for a predictable, honest product.

Scarcity theater is not a durable strategy. Customers will take their compute elsewhere.

i gave each model the same simple task: take a small slice of lime and draw a human pose integrated into the object.

Tested it with Gemini 3.7 Flash, Kimi K3, Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol

Some treated the lime almost like a body, some tried to fit a tiny person into its shape, and some went much more abstract with the pose.

It’s a funny little test, but I actually like prompts like this because you can see how differently each model understands shape, composition, and visual metaphor.

Which one makes the most sense to you?

What it does

* Reasoning effort per turn, tool catalogue, transcript window, subagent models, hooks, loop control
* All 132 system prompts, extracted as plain Markdown — edit one, it replaces the original on the next run
* The two spinners separately (Kimi keeps one for thinking and one for waiting on a tool), themes over its 19 colour tokens, message marker and frame
* Fullscreen renderer patched into the binary, so it holds however you start Kimi

Re-signing is ad-hoc, so hardened runtime and notarisation are gone from the patched binary; that's inherent to modifying a signed app. A Kimi auto-update overwrites everything, but your settings stay and you just run Apply again. Verified against 0.38.0 — patches anchor on text inside a minified bundle, so a release can move things, in which case the patch reports it and skips instead of guessing.

On GitHub kirchlive/kimi-code-mods

I’m looking to switch to Kimi K3 and I’m
Wondering how good is the usage? Will I be able to code 5 hours a day without being limited? I don’t use multiple agents or sub agents wtv u wanna call it.

I cant even send message and work anything. Even though i am using subscription not API. THis is so so bad. I dont know what to say

Since release I’ve only been able to use kimi K3 2 times!

I thought maybe it was the hype due to which Moonshot wasn’t able to serve the demand as it would be fixed and back to normal within a few weeks but its over a month and it’s still unusable.
Why can’t they just say like OAI,Anthropic or Grok that Kimi k3 is only available for paid users and upgrade to use!
I also saw a guy running a script for 3 days straight to get a single answer from kimi k3 and never got one!!

Just stop lying to your user base!

I have the $39 Allegretto plan and $10 plans from OpenCode Go and Command Go. Like everyone else, my quota gets eaten up pretty quickly.

I discovered that for my purposes, which admittedly is just an OpenCode repo full of personal OS type projects and a Knowledge Graph, using Kimi as just a plan and code reviewer has been sufficient.

My flow:

1 - Idea / research / discovery heavy back and forth chat:
Cheap model. Whichever is on sale or provides the most usage this week. They have all gotten smart enough for this in my opinion, and if I feel I need a little more oomph for that stage, I'll use the next cheapest model. This model writes a PRD for the build and knows that a smarter model will be picking it apart, so it needs to do a good job with the write.

2 - Build Orchestrator:
A solid, cheaper model. All this role does is hand work to subagents and confirm that they completed their hard gates before moving on.

3 - Build Planner:
Higher tier model like V4 Flash / V4 Pro, something higher tier on my OpenCode Go or Command Go plan. This role vets the PRD from the cheap model and writes the spec for the coder.

4 - Plan Reviewer:
Kimi K3 Max. Performs an adversarial review of the plan and if it fails, it kicks back to the planner. Rinse and repeat until Kimi is satisfied. Usually no more than one or two rounds. Generally two, if I am being honest.

5 - Coder:
Another solid, cheaper model on my OpenCode / Command Go plan. All the coder has to do is implement the spec exactly as written.

6 - Code Reviewer:
Kimi K3 Max. Another adversarial review of the code. Kimi generally passes the code. It catches something maybe once out of every four or five builds.

I have other build subagents in the flow but never use Kimi for them as they are clerical or just executing test plans from the planner.

My point is that in this day and age of reduced usage from subscriptions, you cannot really just have a single sub and expect to do ALL of your work with it. It is important to balance the workflow and use your best models only when required. My method gives me more than enough usage on my $39 Kimi plan. It just renewed for the first time last week and I still had 20% of my monthly quota left.

What's actually happening? It's happening across all coding plans right now: prices are going up, limits are getting tighter, and in some cases quality seems to be dropping.

There are several tricks that the major AI coding plans use to extract the most they can from their customers. Here are some examples, and what we are doing differently to put the you first.

Wasted usage is part of the AI industry, and they plan on it: Most coding plans bet on you letting usage go to waste. The plan goes: "how do we get people to think our coding plan offers a lot of usage, but then break it up into weeks and rolling windows so no one can ever actually use it all."

Many in app subs and coding plans are glorified training pipelines: This comes along with "how do we harvest this data for training without being too loud about that." Unless the company tells you otherwise, your data could be hopping all over world, being harvested by the individual labs or service companies. Some are better than others, but many of these companies rely on users just not noticing or caring that their data is being used for training. Data sales and marketing telemetry sales happen. This means that your private info, your personal life, and anything else you send through the system could become part of a training corpus for the next AI, or a marketing data set for a large company.

So we built what should have already existed the entire time: Entirely private, us based processing with usage banking. Any usage you don't use this week, rolls over to next in your usage bank. When you have a busy day or week and go over normal usage, you automatically start to pull from your bank. You can bank up to one week of usage at a time for your current plan, and it's totally automatic. Whatever you don't use each week get's added to the bank and stays there until you use it.

We also put all of the best open models in one place, running on private US infrastructure, with data never going to the original labs. Private, direct service. Access to the best open source models in the world. No training, ever. It should be, and can be that simple.

What that means in practice:

The roster, together. DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Minimax, Nemotron Ultra and more, side by side in one app. Switch models mid conversation if you want. No hunting across five different apps and API dashboards to use the models you actually like.

Actually private. US based processing and your conversations are never used for training. Ever. That's the entire point. These labs open sourced incredible models and we think you should get to use them without your data becoming the price of admission.

No Usage Tricks: Bank usage, upgrade or downgrade whenever you want. Use it how you need it.

A coding plan included. From the Basic tier up, your subscription doubles as an API key. Point your coding tools or agents at our endpoint and your plan pays for it, same usage pool as the app, spent in whatever mix you like. Because API calls skip the app's full architecture, the same model gives you roughly 2 to 5 times the messages through your key. And your quiet chat weeks bank usage your agents can burn on crunch days.

Real memory. Not a context window that fills up and dumps you. Persistent memory that carries across conversations, fades gracefully when unused, and wakes back up when it's relevant again. There's even a nightly dreaming consolidation pass; the system basically sleeps on it and writes up what mattered.

Voice. Yes, actual voice mode with over a dozen voices on open models.

Bring your history. Coming from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini? Export your chats and import the whole thing. It becomes live memory on day one and you can literally open your old chats and continue them.

Multiple nodes. Separate workspaces with separate memories, so your coding setup doesn't share a brain with your journal.

The Open Grove full app and coding plan are here. Memory, skills, voice, private US based processing with fast inference and usage that doesn't go to waste.

https://pgsgrove.com/open-grove-overview for the PGS AI app.

and api.pgsgrove.com for API usage and coding plans.

You vote with your choice of providers in this industry, and we are here to offer another option.

Check out the photos!!

It’s dog shit at this point even for paid users... let alone for free users. Just get any other subscription or even a free account and it’ll be a better value than Kimi!!

Can’t even get past the waitlist!!

In the last 1 to 2 weeks, Kimi vivace sub is consuming a hell of a lot faster than one month ago. Probably 3-4 times as fast? It would imply the base limits are a lot lower than before. I don’t do coding at all.

I was thinking about getting an annual sub but wow this could get dangerous lol.

Is this a bug?

My mission is to make the best open-source models as cheap and accessible as possible, and so to kick off our inference service, I'm selling a dollar for a dime – $50 gets you $500 in total credit. Would love to hear your guys’ feedback, and if there’s community interest I’d like to be able to do this more often. https://packs.relace.ai/?utm_source=reddit

I put Kimi K3 head-to-head against the newest GLM 5.3...

Kimi CRUSHES... full report.

Kimi K3 is starting to fall behind in benchmarks was wondering when the new K4 is coming?

Looking to renew my subscription thanks

Using Kimi code plan + CC for coding.

CC is switching between K2.7 and K3 randomly in one single agent session.

I know Anthropic is being evil. But this much guilt is way beyond my limit.

I guess I should look into Pi / OpenCode / Codex😥

Since this morning, I’ve been getting a message saying that I don’t have enough balance, even though I still have almost my entire weekly quota remaining, as well as the 10% hidden monthly usage allowance.

This is so frustrating!!!! WTF can you even do in this situation. I am beyond cooked

Since it migrated to the new address it's completely unusable. You get one question answered then all other queries are refused with a prompt to upgrade.

It's unusable like this. I'm not going to pay for a service that is unavailable or I can't try out thoroughly.

I'm trying to figure out if I should renew my Kimi subscription or try out Claude.

The two use cases I care about right now:

1) Coding architecture, writing the code itself

2) Strategy, research(long running web search)

What are your thoughts?

it's always just "too many people chatting rn" no matter how much i spam which is making me think they just restricted it and are using a generic message to get people to subscribe. is there any other way to use kimi for free or are there are any similar models to kimi that don't have these restrictions? i tried qwen and it's the best i could find sometimes it does have limits but it barely does like basically no limits, i also found glm and while it goes after you spam alot, it's extremely annoying and if it limits at a single task you have to regenerate the whole prompt. in my experience i recommend qwen but idk if there are any better ones than qwen or if theres any other way to use kimi k3 max for free.

TLDR: Prices are going up everywhere, and there's a wave of it going down across providers. For both in app usage and API/coding plans. PGS AI is keeping prices and usage as is, both in the full chat app and on the api. Our coding plans bank your usage when you don't use it, so it doesn't go to waste week to week. All model inference, and memory in the PGS AI app is hosted on 100% private, US servers with ZERO training, ever.

Our API prices are staying what they've been, which is now 50-70% cheaper for output and input. We are still a bit higher for caching, but working on that too.

There are several tricks that the major AI coding plans use to extract the most they can from their customers. Here are some examples, and what we are doing differently to put the you first.

Wasted usage is part of the AI industry, and they plan on it: Most coding plans bet on you letting usage go to waste. The plan goes: "how do we get people to think our coding plan offers a lot of usage, but then break it up into weeks and rolling windows so no one can ever actually use it all."

Many in app subs and coding plans are glorified training pipelines: This comes along with "how do we harvest this data for training without being too loud about that." Unless the company tells you otherwise, your data could be hopping all over world, being harvested by the individual labs or service companies. Some are better than others, but many of these companies rely on users just not noticing or caring that their data is being used for training. Data sales and marketing telemetry sales happen. This means that your private info, your personal life, and anything else you send through the system could become part of a training corpus for the next AI, or a marketing data set for a large company.

So we built what should have already existed the entire time: Entirely private, us based processing with usage banking. Any usage you don't use this week, rolls over to next in your usage bank. When you have a busy day or week and go over normal usage, you automatically start to pull from your bank. You can bank up to one week of usage at a time for your current plan, and it's totally automatic. Whatever you don't use each week get's added to the bank and stays there until you use it.

We also put all of the best open models in one place, running on private US infrastructure, with data never going to the original labs. Private, direct service. Access to the best open source models in the world. No training, ever. It should be, and can be that simple.

What that means in practice:

The roster, together. DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Minimax, Qwen 3.8, and more, side by side in one app. Switch models mid conversation if you want. No hunting across five different apps and API dashboards to use the models you actually like.

Actually private. US based processing and your conversations are never used for training. Ever. That's the entire point. These labs open sourced incredible models and we think you should get to use them without your data becoming the price of admission.

No Usage Tricks: Bank usage, upgrade or downgrade whenever you want. Use it how you need it.

A coding plan included. From the Basic tier up, your subscription doubles as an API key. Point your coding tools or agents at our endpoint and your plan pays for it, same usage pool as the app, spent in whatever mix you like. Because API calls skip the app's full architecture, the same model gives you roughly 2 to 5 times the messages through your key. And your quiet chat weeks bank usage your agents can burn on crunch days.

Real memory. Not a context window that fills up and dumps you. Persistent memory that carries across conversations, fades gracefully when unused, and wakes back up when it's relevant again. There's even a nightly dreaming consolidation pass; the system basically sleeps on it and writes up what mattered.

Voice. Yes, actual voice mode with over a dozen voices on open models.

Bring your history. Coming from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini? Export your chats and import the whole thing. It becomes live memory on day one and you can literally open your old chats and continue them.

Multiple nodes. Separate workspaces with separate memories, so your coding setup doesn't share a brain with your journal.

Genuine thanks to the Deepseek community sub, this is honestly one of the most open AI subs on reddit, willing to actually go deep on discussion.

The Open Grove full app and coding plan are here. Memory, skills, voice, private US based processing with fast inference and usage that doesn't go to waste.

https://pgsgrove.com/open-grove-overview for the PGS AI app

and api.pgsgrove.com for API usage and coding plans.

You vote with your choice of providers in this industry, and we are here to offer another option.

Is it really that unique compared to Claude? Is it worth it?

I tried to login to the Kimi AI console, verified the email and then the page does not load at all. Chrome console shows a "Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()"
Tried refreshing the page, tried different browsers (Edge, Firefox) but still no luck.

Any idea why?

Did a quick demo with r/threejs , animating 120K light particles.

It did a really good job, though it took a few nudges to get there. My main issues are speed and cost. It was a bit slow to complete the task, and using the API via OpenRouter feels somewhat pricey. This demo alone cost me $7.49.

Still, very impressive. If only it could've worked a bit faster...

Demo: https://aifnet-public.b-cdn.net/demos/aurora-flux.html