# Moondream 3 Preview

> Moondream 3 Preview is a vision-language model from Moondream with a mixture-of-experts architecture (9B total parameters, 2B active). It answers questions about images, captions them, reads text (OCR) and reasons over what it sees, with a 32K-token context. Moondream 3.1 is its successor.

**ID**: `moondream/moondream3-preview`  
**Creator**: moondream  
**Category**: multimodal  
**Context**: 32K tokens  
**Pricing**: $0.30 / $2.50 per 1M · billed by your provider (BYOK)  
**Released**: 2025-09-18  
**Web page**: https://anyrouter.dev/model/moondream/moondream3-preview

**Input modalities**: text, image  
**Output modalities**: text  

**Capabilities**: vision, streaming, ocr

## Usage

**Endpoint**: `POST https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/chat/completions`

```bash
curl https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "model": "moondream/moondream3-preview",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Say hi in 3 words."
    }
  ]
}'
```

## Providers

| Provider | Input | Output |
| --- | --- | --- |
| openrouter-byok | $0.30/M (list) | $2.50/M (list) |
| aimlapi-byok | $0.30/M (list) | $2.50/M (list) |
| infron-byok | $0.30/M (list) | $2.50/M (list) |

BYOK routes are billed by your own provider key — AnyRouter charges $0. Rates marked (list) are the provider's published list price.

## Model card

- Architecture: mixture of experts [1]
- Total parameters: 9B [1]
- Active parameters: 2B [1]
- Native context: 32000 tokens [1]
- License: Business Source License 1.1 (Moondream 3 Preview) [3]

### Strengths [1,2]

- Visual reasoning with an optional reasoning mode
- Object detection, pointing and counting
- Structured (JSON) output from images

### Use cases [1]

- Image question answering and captioning
- OCR and document reading

### Links

- announcement: https://moondream.ai/blog/moondream-3-preview
- model card: https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview
- docs: https://moondream.ai/c/docs/quickstart
- Next version: https://anyrouter.dev/model/moondream/moondream3.1-9b-a2b

### Sources

1. [Moondream 3 Preview model card](https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview/raw/main/README.md) (accessed 2026-10-30)
2. [Moondream 3 Preview: Frontier-level reasoning at a blazing speed](https://moondream.ai/blog/moondream-3-preview) (accessed 2026-10-30)
3. [Moondream 3 Preview license (BSL 1.1)](https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview/raw/main/LICENSE.md) (accessed 2026-10-30)

## Source

- Upstream docs: https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview