Free (China)
CNY 0
Per month
- Unlimited basic conversations
- Limited advanced features
- Community support
Moonshot AI: Foundation Models
Founded 2023|Beijing, China|51-200 people
What is Moonshot AI?
Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in March 2023 by Tsinghua University alumni Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu, and Wu Yuxin. The company's name was inspired by Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Moonshot developed Kimi, a chatbot capable of processing up to 2 million Chinese characters per conversation, demonstrating advanced long-context capabilities. The company achieved rapid growth, raising USD 1 billion from Alibaba at a USD 2.5 billion valuation in February 2024, followed by USD 300 million from Tencent and Gaorong Capital at a USD 3.3 billion valuation in August 2024. Kimi K2 delivers competitive performance with fresh, non-sycophantic communication praised by former OpenAI researchers, with API pricing at USD 0.15-2.50 per million tokens undercutting Western competitors. However, infrastructure reliability issues caused frequent outages during peak usage, and Anthropic accused Moonshot of using fraudulent accounts to scrape Claude conversations for training in February 2026.
Strengths and tradeoffs
What this tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
- Exceptional long-context processing (2M characters)
- Highly cost-effective pricing undercutting competitors
- Strong funding (USD 1.3B) from Alibaba and Tencent
- Fresh communication style without excessive agreeableness
Cons
- Infrastructure reliability issues with frequent outages
- Anthropic accused company of fraudulent data scraping
- Primarily optimized for Chinese language use cases
- Peak usage performance inconsistent
Plans & pricing
What's included in each plan, and how the tiers compare.
Basic (China)
CNY 49
Per month
- Full Kimi access
- Advanced features
- Priority processing
- 50% student discount
Premium (China)
CNY 199
Per month
- Heavy user tier
- Highest priority
- Maximum features
- Extended usage
API Access
$0.15-2.50
Per million tokens
- Kimi K2 API
- Cost-effective pricing
- Scalable usage
- Developer access
Using Moonshot AI with Respan
Integrate Moonshot AI's Kimi with Respan to access cost-effective Chinese LLMs with exceptional long-context capabilities. Leverage Kimi's 2 million character processing alongside Respan's multi-provider orchestration. Optimize costs with Moonshot's competitive pricing while maintaining quality for Chinese language applications.
- Process up to 2 million Chinese characters per conversation
- Access cost-effective API at USD 0.15-2.50 per million tokens
- Leverage fresh, non-sycophantic communication style
- Achieve competitive performance on coding and reasoning tasks
Run Moonshot AI in production with Respan
10KFree traces/mo
1,000+Models
5 minSetup
Respan lets you trace LLM and agent calls across any model or framework, A/B test prompts on production traffic, and route requests across 1,000+ models through one gateway.
Try Respan freeBest Moonshot AI alternatives & competitors
Top companies in Foundation Models you can use instead of Moonshot AI.
OpenAI
GPT-4o and GPT-4 Turbo frontier models
Anthropic
Claude 4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models
Google AI
Gemini 2.0 multimodal models
Meta AI
Llama open-source model family
Mistral AI
Mistral Large and Mixtral models
Voyage AI (MongoDB)
Text & multimodal embeddings
Cohere
Command R+ for RAG applications
Microsoft
Small language models
xAI
Grok models with real-time data access
DeepSeek
DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 models
Databricks (DBRX)
Black Forest Labs
Image generation
Alibaba Qwen
Qwen2 open-source model series
Snowflake
Arctic models
Stability AI
Stable Diffusion image generation
Reka
01.AI
Zhipu AI
Guide Labs
Inherently interpretable LLM architecture
Cascade
Model distillation
Luel
Natural language to training data
Moonshot AI models and API status
Live API status, the current flagship model and how Moonshot AI's models compare, from the Respan model hub.
Compare Moonshot AI
Side-by-side comparisons with other tools in this category.
Best integrations for Moonshot AI
Companies from adjacent layers in the AI stack that work well with Moonshot AI.
Last verified: March 10, 2026