What the Kimi family is
Moonshot AI's Kimi models are long-context oriented, and access to them is split between Moonshot's own platform and gateways that resell the same model IDs.
Providers offering Kimi on free terms
2 of the 25 providers detailed in this catalog list at least one Kimi model. Because Moonshot AI publishes the weights rather than the service, the model id can be identical across all of them while the free allowance is not.
| Provider | Free access | Published limits | Card | Matching models |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moonshot AI (Kimi) | Metered access | Published per tier | Not required | kimi-k2-0905-preview, moonshot-v1-8k, moonshot-v1-128k |
| Vercel AI Gateway | Free trial credit | Published as a credit balance | Not required | moonshotai/kimi-k2 |
How the free terms actually differ
- Moonshot AI (Kimi) — The tier table is keyed to cumulative recharge rather than to a standing free allowance: the docs state you must recharge at least $1 before you can start using the platform, and Tier0 then gives 1 concurrent request, 3 RPM, 500K TPM and 1.5M TPD.
- Vercel AI Gateway — Every Vercel team account gets a free tier, but it covers a subset of models rather than the full catalog, and free-tier requests are rate limited per model at lower limits than the paid tier — those per-model numbers are not published.
Picking one
0 of these 2 publish a fixed request count; the rest state a tier or a credit balance instead, which means the only honest answer to "how much is free" is the one in their console. 2 take no credit card. 2 answer a cross-origin browser request, so a key for those can be checked from the browser checker with nothing installed.
A model id that matches Kimi is not a promise that the free tier includes it. Providers move individual models between paid and free without changing the id, which is why each row links to the provider page carrying that provider's own wording and the date it was read.