Three models came out in the last six weeks that most Indian teams will shortlist. Here is the comparison by what you pay and what you get, using each vendor's own published numbers (checked 29 October 2026).
| Kimi K3.1 Pro | Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Deepseek V4.1 Flash | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Released | 23 Oct 2026 | 28 Sep 2026 | 10 Sep 2026 |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | ~$2 / $10 (third-party listings) | $2 / $10 | ~$0.30 / $1.20 (OpenRouter) |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | 65.7% (Moonshot) | 70.6% (Anthropic) | not published |
| Context | 1M | not stated | 1M |
| Weights | Due by 4 Nov | Closed | MIT |
Which one to pick
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 for the best agentic coding at this price. On Anthropic's own table it even beats Opus 5.5 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (70.6% vs 66.4%) at half the price.
- Kimi K3.1 Pro if you want near-frontier quality with the option to self-host once the weights land. Vals.ai independently ranks it 8th of 27 models.
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash for volume. It is several times cheaper, MIT-licensed, and reads images too.
Two traps that change the bill
- Kimi K3.1 Pro only runs in thinking mode. Moonshot's docs say requests with thinking disabled are rejected, so every call pays for reasoning tokens.
- Claude Opus 5.5 always thinks too. If you reach for Opus for short, simple calls, you pay for reasoning you don't need. Sonnet 5.5 or Haiku 5.5 ($0.10 / $0.50 for prompts under 100K tokens) is the cheaper route.
Benchmarks are averages; your workload is not. Put your real token counts into a calculator before choosing. I keep one here, with all three models: https://aicreatorhub.net/models/cost-calculator
Full model pages, each with the vendor's sources:
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