The closest alternative to Kimi K2 Thinking is gpt-oss-20b (free) — comparable intelligence (24.5 vs 24.1); for a cheaper option, MiniMax M3 runs $0.300/M vs $0.600/M; for more speed, Mercury 2 hits 590 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
gpt-oss-20b (free) is the closest alternative to Kimi K2 Thinking, with an Intelligence Index of 24.5 (Kimi K2 Thinking scores 24.1) at Free per million input tokens.
Yes — MiniMax M3 costs $0.300 per million input tokens versus $0.600 for Kimi K2 Thinking, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Kimi K2 Thinking — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.