| Best For | Trade-offs | |
|---|---|---|
| Moonshot API (direct) | Easiest setup, official support | $0.60/$3.00 per 1M tokens, data leaves your infrastructure |
| US based providers (Fireworks, OpenRouter) | US data residency, simple integration | Slight price variation, third party dependency |
| Self-hosted (vLLM/TGI) | Full control, data sovereignty, offline access | Requires multiple A100/H100 GPUs, operational overhead |
| Quantized (GGUF/AWQ/GPTQ) | Lower hardware requirements | Some quality degradation, community maintained |
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MoonViT vision encoder
Annual cost comparison for equivalent workloads
K2.5 costs approximately $13,800 per year for a typical workload. The same workload on GPT-5.2 costs approximately $56,500, and on Claude Opus 4.6 approximately $150,000. That is roughly 76% lower than both closed source alternatives for comparable output quality.
Who should self-host?
Self-hosting K2.5 makes sense if you need data sovereignty (no data leaves your infrastructure), want to fine-tune the model on proprietary data, need offline or air-gapped access, or process enough volume that per token API costs exceed the cost of running your own hardware. For everyone else, the API through Moonshot or a US based provider like Fireworks is simpler and more cost effective.