DeepSeek vs Kimi

DeepSeek

Pick DeepSeek for the price-performance of the API and the open weights, not for the chat app, which is a plain assistant without the connectors and workspace features the big consumer products now carry. For a developer paying per token it is hard to beat; for a company with data-residency rules the China-hosted service and PRC-law terms settle the question before quality does.

Pros

• +Flash output at $1.20 per million tokens peak and $0.60 off-peak undercuts every Western frontier API by a wide margin
• +Open-weight releases mean the models can be run locally or on any cloud, with no lock-in to the hosted service
• +1M-token context on both current models, with cached-input pricing that makes long agent loops cheap
• +Chat app is free on web, iOS and Android with no tier to upgrade to

Cons

• −Terms are governed by the law of mainland China and the operator is a Hangzhou company, which rules it out for many regulated buyers
• −Peak and off-peak pricing by UTC window makes budgeting and benchmarking fiddly
• −Concurrency caps (2,500 for Flash, 500 for V4-Pro) and periodic capacity squeezes hit production workloads
• −The chat product trails ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude on connectors, projects and team features

Kimi

Kimi is the most agent-shaped of the big Chinese assistants: scheduled tasks, parallel agent swarms, slides, spreadsheets and deep research sit next to the chat box rather than in separate products. The K-series models are competitive and cheap through the API. The friction for a Western buyer is practical — a mostly Chinese interface, Chinese data jurisdiction, and a pricing page we could not read.

Pros

• +Runs on Moonshot's own K-series models rather than reselling someone else's
• +Scheduled tasks, agent swarms, deep research, slides and spreadsheets are built in
• +Free tier covers basic chat, file uploads and web search
• +The same models are available through a developer API at low per-token rates

Cons

• −The vendor's pricing page rendered no figures during this check
• −Interface and most documentation are in Chinese
• −Data is processed by a Chinese provider, which rules it out for many enterprises

Does DeepSeek or Kimi have a free tier?

Both: DeepSeek has a free tier, and Kimi has a free tier.

Which has a public API, DeepSeek or Kimi?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.