# Step 5 Preview by StepFun

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Step 5 Preview by StepFun and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for its price-performance and fast throughput on OpenRouter. Critics say it is verbose and its reasoning runs too long.

## Why people recommend it

- Good price-performance for the cost (2 comments): "The price/performance looks interesting, though it also seems pretty verbose." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764326)) "Pretty decent "API" rates for ~500M+ tokens on Step Fun 5" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773340))
- Fast, usable generation speed (2 comments): "The average speed is 115 tokens/sec according to OpenRouter." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50010320)) "I can get ~45tok/sec which is quite usable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021281))

## What people warn about

- Verbose output and overlong reasoning (3 comments): "The price/performance looks interesting, though it also seems pretty verbose." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764326)) "A huge amount of waffly padding around a thesis that may or may not exist." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49777880)) "their model reasons too much and too long" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49779730))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend
- [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Step 5 Preview by StepFun", https://hackerapproved.com/p/step-5-preview/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).