At $2/$6, it can be much more "approachable" than K3. Wondering what have they done differently to be able to afford this price (that K3 couldn't, apparently - most other providers offer similar prices to K3 itself).
Moonshot is printing money on k3. It likely costs the same to serve as qwen3.8. The license requires all major inference providers to sign an extra (secret) licensing agreement with moonshot that almost certainly requires them to agree to this price and pay royalties to moonshot. Watch as the k3 price plummets over the next 1-2 weeks.
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Qwen is Alibaba. Alibaba rents hardware to Moonshot. So Qwen always has the option of cheaper hardware. Qwen might also break even on inference as competitive advantage since Alibaba has wider pockets. Alibaba also owns a 36% stake in Moonshot, which must make pricing discussions interesting... but then again Google rents hardware to OpenAI and Anthropic.