Kimi K3 Drops to 6 Credits, and Every Plan Unlocks a Better Model

TL;DR:

• Gemini 3.6 Flash: 5 → 3 credits, free on every plan, and now the default model for chat and plan mode
• Kimi K3: 10 → 6 credits, and it now unlocks on Starter instead of Hobbyist
• Claude Sonnet 5: 12 → 10 credits, and it now unlocks on Creator instead of Pro
• Claude Opus 5 now unlocks on Hobbyist instead of Pro
• Every paid plan now unlocks a better model — no more paying more for the same lineup
• Pro gets new models first, typically a week or two before anyone else
• Nothing retired, nothing to do — if a repriced model was your saved pick, it just costs less now

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Prices Down, Access Up

We just refreshed the model lineup. Then we looked at what those models actually cost us to run, and the honest answer was: less than we were charging.

So we cut the prices.

The new lineup

Nothing has been retired and nothing has been taken away. If one of these was your saved model, it stays selected — it just costs fewer credits per message from now on.

Why the cuts

We price each model just above what it actually costs us to run, so when our real costs come in lower than our estimates, the price should follow.

Gemini 3.6 Flash was the first one we re-measured, and the result was stark enough that we moved it two plans down: it went from 5 credits to 3, and from Hobbyist all the way to Free. Fast multimodal reasoning is now something you get without paying us anything.

Kimi K3 was the biggest gap of all. Measured against real sessions rather than a worst-case estimate, it costs us well under half what we'd budgeted — so it drops from 10 credits to 6.

Claude Sonnet 5 came down for the same reason, if less dramatically: 12 to 10.

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Flash Is Now the Default

Alongside the price cut, Gemini 3.6 Flash is now the model you get by default — in regular chat and in plan mode.

Plan mode is where this matters most. It used to plan your work with Flash and then hand the plan to MiniMax M3 to build. That hand-off was the weak link: the model that wrote the plan wasn't the model that had to execute it, and detail got lost in the gap. Now one model does both ends, and plans survive contact with the build.

Two things worth knowing:

• The default costs 3 credits a message instead of 1. That's a real change, and we made it deliberately — a cheap message you have to send three times isn't cheap. If you want the 1-credit option, MiniMax M3 is still right there in the picker.
• MiniMax M3 is still your unlimited fallback. When your weekly budget runs out, you keep coding on M3 at no charge, on every plan. That hasn't changed and isn't going to.

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A Better Model at Every Step Up

Here's something we got wrong, and have now fixed.

Until today, Free, Starter, and Creator all offered the same set of models. If you were on Free and wanted something more capable, the first plan that actually unlocked a new model was Hobbyist — three steps up. Starter and Creator gave you more usage, but nothing you couldn't already do.

That's backwards. Paying more should get you something you couldn't do before.

Now every paid plan unlocks a genuinely better model:

• Starter ($20) → Kimi K3, our deep agentic reasoning model, for the tasks where the AI has to hold your whole project in its head and grind through a plan
• Creator ($50) → Claude Sonnet 5, frontier intelligence for everyday building
• Hobbyist ($100) → Claude Opus 5, the most capable model we offer, for the gnarly bug and the big architectural call

If you're on Starter or Creator today, you didn't just get a price cut — you got a model you didn't have yesterday.

What Pro is for now

With every model available at Hobbyist, Pro is about volume and being first: 2x the weekly credits, the 13,000 monthly art budget, and new models first. When we add a model, Pro gets it roughly a week or two ahead of everyone else. Given how fast this lineup has been moving, that's a real head start.

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Cheaper Per Message Isn't Always Cheaper Per Task

One thing worth knowing, because the sticker prices can mislead you.

The credit cost you see is per message. What you actually care about is what it costs to finish the thing you're building — and better models finish in fewer turns. Kimi K3 and Gemini 3.6 Flash work through a task in roughly half the back-and-forth that cheaper models need on the same job.

So a feature that takes K3 three or four messages at 6 credits often costs you less than the same feature on a cheaper model that needs seven messages to get there.

The rule of thumb: for anything involved, reach for the stronger model. For quick edits and small questions, the cheap ones are still the right call.

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A Tidier Model Picker

The model list was starting to sprawl, so we've tightened it up. The picker now leads with the five models above — a clean run from 1 credit to 20 — with anything else behind a More models row at the bottom. Hover it and a small panel slides out to the side.

GLM-5.2 has moved in there. It's still available, still costs 5 credits, still on exactly the same plans as before. It's just not in the main list anymore, because with Kimi K3 now at 6 credits, we'd rather point you at K3.

Nothing has been removed. If GLM-5.2 is your pick, it stays your pick, and the row shows a dot so you can see your selection lives in there.

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In Short

Everything got cheaper or more available, and usually both:

• Gemini 3.6 Flash costs 40% less, is free on every plan, and is now the default
• Kimi K3 costs 40% less and arrives three plans earlier
• Claude Sonnet 5 costs less and arrives two plans earlier
• Claude Opus 5 arrives one plan earlier
• Every paid plan now unlocks something new

No action needed on your end. Open the model picker and you'll see the new prices already in place.

As always, the picker shows every model with its quality level and per-message cost, and models above your plan still appear locked with an upgrade prompt — so you can always see exactly what the next step up gets you.