Intel / post

OpenRouter free tier for Step 3.5 Flash jumps to 10K calls a day

Source: x.com
Date: Published Feb 9, 2026

StepFun@StepFun_ai

You got Step 3.5 Flash trending on OpenRouter — even with tight limits. We noticed 👀 So we bumped it up 10x: 1K → 10K calls/day. Thanks for the love 🙏

Feb 9, 2026 View on X

Context

Per StepFun's post, the free daily call limit for Step 3.5 Flash on OpenRouter increased tenfold, from 1,000 to 10,000 calls a day, which StepFun attributes to the model trending on OpenRouter despite the tighter original limit.

Step 3.5 Flash is StepFun's open-weight, 196-billion-parameter model that activates about 11 billion parameters per token, with a 256K-token ; StepFun's own release reported 74.4 percent on and 51.0 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.0, both tests of an agent's ability to complete real coding and terminal tasks (release details). The higher free-tier ceiling gives more room to run a full , rather than a handful of isolated calls, against that model without paying.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

mixture-of-experts — A model built from many specialist sub-networks where only a few activate per token, giving big-model capability at small-model running cost.
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
SWE-bench — The standard benchmark for AI coding agents: real GitHub issues from real repositories, scored by whether the agent's patch passes the project's own tests.
agentic loop — The cycle an agent runs in: decide, call a tool, read the result, decide again — repeating until the goal is met or a stop condition fires.

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