Free Kimi K3 API via Modal

Kimi K3 model is now available on Modal.com and they provide $30/mo credits every month on their free plan. You might need to add credit card though.

It’s covered by Modal’s standard offer: $30 of free compute every single month, so you can keep using K3 on the Shared API for free, month over month.

So essentially, you get $30 worth of usage of Kimi K3 model on their shared token based usage

How to get started?

Create a new managed endpoint and choose Kimi K3 in modal dashboard

You’ll get a dedicated endpoint like this: https://example--ep-kimi-k3-server.us-west.modal.direct

You can click on the quick start to get code snippets. Make sure to get MODAL_PROXY_TOKEN_SECRET as well which is needed to make the request

curl "https://example--ep-kimi-k3-server.us-west.modal.direct/v1/chat/completions" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Modal-Key: $MODAL_PROXY_TOKEN_ID" \
  -H "Modal-Secret: $MODAL_PROXY_TOKEN_SECRET" \
  -d '{
    "model": "moonshotai/Kimi-K3",
    "messages": [
      {
        "role": "system",
        "content": "You are a concise technical assistant."
      },
      {
        "role": "user",
        "content": "Explain why low latency matters for LLM endpoints in three bullets."
      }
    ],
    "temperature": 0.3,
    "max_tokens": 2048,
    "top_p": 0.95,
    "stream": false,
    "reasoning_effort": "none"
  }'

It’s a OpenAI chat completion format API endpoint.