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Kimi's platform drops seven model IDs on 31 August — and the flagship it points to charges 3× more per output token

Moonshot AI is retiring its entire classic generation line. The model list on the Kimi API platform now carries a single note: following the Kimi K3 launch, `kimi-k2.5` and the `moonshot-v1` series are no longer available to newly registered users, with a full platform sunset on 31 August. That covers seven model identifiers — moonshot-v1 in 8k, 32k and 128k variants, the three matching vision-preview versions, and Kimi K2.5, the model the company itself described as open-source state of the art for agentic, code and vision tasks. Four identifiers survive: K3, K2.7 Code, K2.7 Code Highspeed and K2.6. The cost of moving up is on the same platform's price pages. The largest of the departing models, moonshot-v1-128k, is billed at $2.00 per million input tokens and $5.00 per million output, with a 131,072-token context window. Kimi K3 is billed at $3.00 per million input tokens on a cache miss, $0.30 on a cache hit, and $15.00 per million output — three times the output rate and one and a half times the input rate, for a context window eight times larger at 1,048,576 tokens. Users on the cheapest departing model, moonshot-v1-8k at $0.20 and $2.00, face a steeper jump: fifteen times the input rate and seven and a half times the output rate. What makes this worth recording is the cadence, which only becomes visible when the dates on that one page are read together. Moonshot has switched off kimi-thinking-preview on 11 November 2025, kimi-latest on 28 January 2026, the five-model kimi-k2 series on 25 May 2026, and now the V1 line and K2.5 on 31 August. The gaps are 78, 117 and 98 days: on average, this vendor removes a model family roughly every three months. Self-hosting is the escape hatch that a closed platform does not offer — K3's weights are published under a modified MIT licence with a commercial threshold, and K2.5 was an open-weights release too, so anyone running them on their own hardware is unaffected by the API shutdown. One caveat on the date: the documentation gives only the day and month, without a year. The note is framed as a consequence of the K3 launch, which took place on 16 July 2026, so the deadline falls on 31 August 2026 — twelve days from now. Moonshot published no separate deprecation announcement; the dates live in a table inside the developer documentation.