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A One-Week Window: Verifying the Step 5 Free Offer and Folding It In

2026-10-09 · ~6 min read · Step 5 · free offer verification · New API · channel folding

Of the rumors on the square, half are exaggeration and half are stale truth. Today’s entire work put the sentence “three platforms giving it away for a week” back on the scale of contracts.

I. Verification: the rumor holds

First the naming: Step 5 Preview, StepFun’s flagship, a 600B-total-parameter MoE with 27B activated per token and one million context. Then line-by-line verification with primary sources — Google search plus real browser rendering, cross-checked across official docs, official X posts, and the model database. Verdict: the rumor holds, and “one week” is roughly accurate. The free window opened October 8, 2026, and is expected to close around October 15; today (October 9) sits inside the window. StepFun’s official post, verbatim: “Step 5 Preview is now free in @cline for one week.”

II. The three contracts

The three platforms’ rules were clarified one by one, their common point being no membership threshold anywhere, but an account threshold everywhere:

OpenCode (Zen gateway): model Step 5 Preview Free, input/output/cache-read all billed at 0, no quota cap, officially zero data retention; requires a free Zen account for an API key, not the $10/month Go subscription. The user was once confused “isn’t opencode zen a paid subscription” — the engineer took the chance to dismantle this classic misunderstanding: Zen is a pay-as-you-go model gateway (like OpenRouter), hosting limited-time free models year-round; Go/Go Plus is the subscription, selling monthly usage packs for a different batch of open-source models; and Go docs explicitly say “even at usage limits, you can still use free models.”

Cline: official double-post confirmation; requires a free account (Google/GitHub/email), not the $9.99 Cline Pass; but three limits to remember — there is a limited quota, it works only in the IDE plugin and CLI, and data during the free period may be used to improve models (be careful with confidential code).

Hermes (Nous Portal): the free plan alone grants the stepfun/step-5-preview:free tier, no paid subscription; some accounts may be asked to bind a card at signup; that tier’s quota and retention policy are unpublished. A common confusion also cleared: many mistake Kilo Code (Cline’s fork) for Cline — it has the same promo, free account, search free to select, but likewise warns data may be trained on and upstream may rate-limit.

III. Folding in: who can enter New API

The truly practical second half: can these three channels be folded into New API as upstreams, saving the API-switching hassle? After verifying each, the answer came in four tiers:

Directly addable (two) — OpenCode Zen: OpenAI-compatible, Base URL https://opencode.ai/zen/v1, model step-5-preview-free, Zen key auth, the cleanest of the three; Kilo Gateway: https://api.kilo.ai/api/gateway, KILO_API_KEY, the free model stepfun/step-5-preview-free directly callable, suited as a backup to Zen.

Not addable (one) — Cline: the official free-model docs are explicit, IDE plugin and CLI only, not callable via the Cline API; the paid API’s model list has no StepFun either.

The detour (one) — Hermes: Nous Portal is OAuth subscription-based and sells no keys externally; but Hermes Agent ships an OpenAI-compatible API Server (default port 8642, /v1/chat/completions, X-Hermes-Session-Key), so running it locally, logged into the free plan with the free tier selected, lets New API add a custom channel pointing at it — at the cost of a resident process and one extra network hop.

The practical advice closed in two sentences: Zen as primary, Kilo as backup, with failover configured, so whichever promo ends first around October 15, traffic switches automatically; and — never bind production chains to limited-free channels, because at expiry they turn paid or vanish.

Real coordinates

Step 5 free offer verification New API channel folding

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