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While most people would not be able to run Kimi K2.6 fast enough for a chat, as a coding assistant the low speed matters much less, especially when many tasks can be batched to progress during a single pass over the weights.

If you run it on your own hardware, you can run it 24/7 without worrying about token price or reaching the subscription limits and it is likely that you can do more work, even on much slower hardware. Customizing an open-source harness can also provide a much greater efficiency than something like Claude Code.

For any serious application, you might be more limited by your ability to review the code, than by hardware speed.

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DeepSeek V4 Pro is way more effective at batching multiple tasks together since the KV cache is so much lighter - a max of ~10GB at full 1M context, and in a linear proportion with context according to the DeepSeek V4 release paper. That's extremely impressive, it unlocks batching, agent swarms etc. even on severely memory-constrained platforms, especially at smaller max context.
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Kimi is a natively quantized model, the lossless full precision release is 595GB. Your own link mentions that.
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So, realistically, $100K for an 8x RTX 6000 Pro system that can run it at a usable rate.
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I think people will always disagree on what qualifies as a "usable rate". But keep in mind that practically no one sensible is running the latest Opus or GPT around the clock, especially not at sustainable, unsubsidized prices. With open-weights models it's easy to do that.
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Also for people doing something medical, privacy or sensitive data related, there's an almost incalculable value (depending on industry niche) in having absolutely no external network traffic to any servers/systems you don't fully control.
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the 'unsloth' link above is a 3rd party person that has quantized it to Q8, the original release is considerably larger in size than 600GB:

https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6

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No.

I have downloaded Kimi-K2.6 (the original release).

  du -sh moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 
  555G moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6

  du -s moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 
  581255612 moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6
For comparison (sorted in decreasing sizes, 3 bigger models and 3 smaller models, all are recently launched):

  du -sh zai-org/GLM-5.1
  1.4T zai-org/GLM-5.1
  du -sh XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.5-Pro 
  963G XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.5-Pro
  du -sh deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro
  806G deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro

  du -sh XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.5 
  295G XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.5
  du -sh MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7
  215G MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7
  du -sh deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash
  149G deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash
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That page mentions that the model is natively INT4 for most of the params, and 600GB is in the ballpark of what's available there for download.
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