CyrilXBT|7月 21, 2026 12:49
HOW TO RUN KIMI K3, THE 2.8 TRILLION PARAMETER MODEL THAT JUST BEAT CLAUDE AT FRONTEND CODING, FOR FREE.
K3 debuted at #1 on LMArena's Frontend Code Arena, ahead of Claude Fable 5 on the benchmark that most directly measures production coding value. Six of seven domains won outright.
Here is how to actually access it right now, and what "free" really means at each tier.
The fastest free path:
Go to http://kimi.com or the Kimi app. Sign in. No credit card required.
You get chat plus light coding assistance on the free Adagio tier.
The real limits worth knowing before you get excited:
The free tier does not unlock the full 1 million token context. That sits behind the $99/month Allegro plan.
Kimi Code and Agent Swarm (the actual coding-agent features) are also gated above the free tier.
Moonshot has not published a hard message cap, so check your in-app usage indicator rather than trusting a specific number from any post, including this one.
For developers who want API access without wiring up billing:
Puter.js exposes Kimi K3 through a genuinely free, unrestricted browser API. No keys required.
Good for testing, not for production load.
The actual "no catch, no tier, no rate limit" version arrives July 27, when Moonshot releases the full open weights.
At that point, if you have the hardware, this becomes truly free: self-hosted, no limits at all, running the same model that just beat Claude on frontend.
Save this. I'll update it the moment the weights drop.(CyrilXBT)
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