Short answer, then the detail.
For Budget-sensitive developers; Chinese writing and translation, DeepSeek is the more direct fit. For Reading long reports and papers; Organizing Chinese source material, Kimi gets there with less fighting.
Both have free tiers, so cost only separates them once you hit the limits. Kimi takes more text in one go (1,048,576 tokens (K3 series); 262,144 tokens on the K2 series (checked 2026-10-29) vs 1M tokens of context; up to 384K tokens of output (checked 2026-10-29)), which matters for whole books, long contracts and big codebases.
| Dimension | DeepSeek | Kimi |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing | Web and app free; API list price deepseek-flash CNY 1 / 2 per million input tokens (off-peak / peak) and CNY 4 / 8 output; deepseek-v4-pro CNY 4.5 / 9 input and CNY 13.5 / 27 output (checked 2026-10-29) | Membership annual plans work out to CNY 39 / 79 / 159 / 559 / 1,119 per month, alongside a free tier; API K3.1 Pro CNY 13 input and CNY 68 output per million tokens (CNY 1.3 on cache hits) (checked 2026-10-29) |
| Context window | 1M tokens of context; up to 384K tokens of output (checked 2026-10-29) | 1,048,576 tokens (K3 series); 262,144 tokens on the K2 series (checked 2026-10-29) |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows | Web, iOS, Android |
| Best for | Budget-sensitive developers; Chinese writing and translation; Private or on-premise deployment | Reading long reports and papers; Organizing Chinese source material; Light agent and research tasks |
| Availability | Directly reachable inside mainland China with no proxy, and a China edition exists (checked 2026-10-29). | Directly reachable in mainland China with no proxy, and platform.kimi.com serves the China region (checked 2026-10-29). |
Budget-sensitive developers; Chinese writing and translation; Private or on-premise deployment. Its strongest point: Publishes open weights you can download and self-host. Watch out for: Almost no multimodal support for images or audio.
Reading long reports and papers; Organizing Chinese source material; Light agent and research tasks. Its strongest point: Swallows a whole book and answers against the full text. Watch out for: Concurrency limits bite at Chinese peak times.
Running both is not wasteful here: one earns its keep on retrieval and tool use, the other on long text you intend to keep.
DeepSeek if you want Budget-sensitive developers. Kimi if Reading long reports and papers. Neither has a learning curve worth worrying about past the first day.
Yes — both have free tiers, and the pair covers more ground than either alone.
Kimi takes more text in one go (1,048,576 tokens (K3 series); 262,144 tokens on the K2 series (checked 2026-10-29) vs 1M tokens of context; up to 384K tokens of output (checked 2026-10-29)), which matters for whole books, long contracts and big codebases.