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Kimi.ai: a million-token memory and free chat from Moonshot AI
Updated on September 8, 2026
Kimi.ai is the free AI chat assistant from Moonshot AI, a Chinese lab founded in 2023 and regularly named alongside DeepSeek at the top of China's model makers. Its signature strength is context length, up to 1 million tokens on the top model, enough to swallow entire case files in one go. Basic chat stays unlimited with no credit card required. Paid memberships run from $19 to $199 a month and cover the agent side of the product, with the million-token context reserved for the two top tiers.
Pros
- Unlimited basic chat at no cost
- Giant context window, up to 1 million tokens
- Open-weight models, self-hosting possible
- Web search and file analysis included
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
Cons
- Agent features tightly capped on the free plan
- Data hosted outside the EU
- Current memberships waitlisted while new plans roll out
Free chat built for very long documents
Kimi.ai reads and summarizes PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets and images, with built-in web search and no cap on basic chat. You drop a 300-page thesis into the window, ask three questions, and the answer comes back with the relevant passages quoted. That generosity contrasts with the metered free plan of ChatGPT, and few free AI chat assistants go this far on file handling.
The service also reaches beyond plain conversation (and demand is real, a busy-server notice sometimes pops up at peak hours, so give it a minute). Inside one window you get several tools.
- PDF, Word, Excel, images and screenshots as input
- Web search with cited sources
- An office agent for slides, spreadsheets and presentations
- Sync between phone, computer and browser
Real-world coding and reasoning tests of Kimi's top model
The open-weight models behind Kimi
Moonshot AI publishes the weights of its models, a rare habit at this level of performance. The story began in 2023 with a 128,000-token context window, a record back then, before Kimi K2 made a name for itself on coding tasks. The current top model is Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter giant with a one-million-token context, the largest open-weights model ever published at the time of its release.
K3 also understands images and video, and its Swarm mode runs hundreds of sub-agents in parallel for deep research jobs. At the scale of large language models, a window that size amounts to loading several novels into a single conversation, footnotes included.
Kimi pricing, mobile apps and the data question
The free Adagio plan covers unlimited chat, file uploads and web search. Four paid memberships then add agents, coding credits and growing quotas.
Annual billing trims roughly 20% off each tier, bringing Moderato to $15 a month. At the time of writing, Moonshot is announcing new plans and has put the current memberships on a waitlist, so the subscription page on kimi.com is the only figure worth trusting before you pay. The iOS and Android apps share the same account, and the Android version has passed 6.9 million downloads.
Then comes the data question. The international version stores data outside the EU, in Singapore according to available breakdowns, with no public GDPR commitment confirmed. Nothing alarming for everyday questions, but contracts and medical records have no place in the chat window. For market context, Le Chat by Mistral bets on European hosting, while Kimi answers with giant context and a wide free tier.
| Plan | Monthly price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Adagio | Free | Unlimited chat, files, web search |
| Moderato | $19 | Kimi Code, deep research, slide generation |
| Allegretto | $39 | Higher quotas across the board |
| Allegro | $99 | K3 context up to 1 million tokens, bigger Agent Swarm |
| Vivace | $199 | Maximum capacity, early access to new releases |
Frequently asked questions
Is Kimi AI free?
Yes, basic chat is unlimited and free on kimi.com and in the mobile apps, files and web search included, with no credit card. The Adagio plan is limited to one agent task at a time and a small pool of agent credits. Paid memberships, from $19 to $199 monthly, add Kimi Code, deep research mode and agent swarms with higher quotas.
Is Kimi AI safe for my data?
For everyday questions, yes, with the usual common sense. The company is Chinese and the international version hosts data outside the EU, in Singapore according to available analyses, with no confirmed public GDPR guarantee. Keep confidential documents out of the chat. Cautious companies can self-host the models, since Moonshot publishes their weights.
Kimi AI or DeepSeek, what is the difference?
Both are free Chinese assistants with strong reasoning. Kimi leans on giant context, up to one million tokens, plus parallel agents and a coding agent, while DeepSeek built its reputation on very cheap reasoning models. For digesting long documents or dozens of files at once, Kimi holds the clear lead.
Which model powers Kimi AI?
Moonshot's K series runs the service. Free chat runs on Kimi K2.6, while subscribers reach Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion parameter open-weights model that also understands images and video. Developers can call the same models through the Moonshot platform API, which is billed per token and sold separately from memberships.
Verdict: For chewing through book-length PDFs without paying a cent, few chat assistants keep pace with Kimi. Students, researchers and the ChatGPT-curious will get real mileage from it, with confidential files simply kept on a separate track.
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