Step 5 Preview by StepFun
Shares rank 63 of 72 language models by recommenders
Recommended for its price-performance and fast throughput on OpenRouter. Critics say it is verbose and its reasoning runs too long.
Recommended for its price-performance and fast throughput on OpenRouter. Critics say it is verbose and its reasoning runs too long.
11 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 64%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good price-performance for the cost
“The price/performance looks interesting, though it also seems pretty verbose.”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Stepfun Step 5 Preview (LLM): On AA Pareto frontier” “Pretty decent "API" rates for ~500M+ tokens on Step Fun 5”
Comment from 20 Sep 2026 in “Step 5 Preview: Advancing the Pareto Frontier” Fast, usable generation speed
“The average speed is 115 tokens/sec according to OpenRouter.”
Comment from 8 Oct 2026 in “Step 5 Preview, a 1M-context MoE from StepFun, shows up on OpenRouter” “I can get ~45tok/sec which is quite usable.”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Step 5 Preview, a 1M-context MoE from StepFun, shows up on OpenRouter”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Verbose output and overlong reasoning
“The price/performance looks interesting, though it also seems pretty verbose.”
Comment from 19 Sep 2026 in “Stepfun Step 5 Preview (LLM): On AA Pareto frontier” “A huge amount of waffly padding around a thesis that may or may not exist.”
Comment from 20 Sep 2026 in “Step 5 Preview: Advancing the Pareto Frontier” “their model reasons too much and too long”
Comment from 20 Sep 2026 in “Step 5 Preview: Advancing the Pareto Frontier”
Other language models people recommend
The four most recommended other language models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus | 3,331 | 2,746 | 55% | 13 | 4 mo156 owners | — |
| OpenAI GPT | 1,205 | 987 | 55% | 13 | 6 mo47 owners | — |
| Claude Sonnet | 854 | 586 | 59% | 13 | 6 mo46 owners | — |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | 828 | 223 | 79% | 8 | 1 mo24 owners | Approved |
| Step 5 Preview by StepFunThis page | 7 | 4 | 64% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
All 11 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“broken prompt responses, garbled repo state, derailed trajectories, hallunies”
“I can get ~45tok/sec which is quite usable.”
“Composite indices are only useful for model companies which want to build one horizontal capability for N use cases”
“It looks reasonable by open model standards”
“The average speed is 115 tokens/sec according to OpenRouter.”
“It doesn't look competitive along any dimension”
“their model reasons too much and too long”
“A huge amount of waffly padding around a thesis that may or may not exist.”
“600b-a27b doesn’t sound enticing.”
“Pretty decent "API" rates for ~500M+ tokens on Step Fun 5”
“The price/performance looks interesting, though it also seems pretty verbose.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.