StepFun's flagship model is free to use right now.

2026-10-14 03:51

StepFun's flagship model is free to use right now. WorkBuddy just plugged in Step 5 Preview, with an exclusive two-week free window through Oct 25. No credits deducted, domestic or international version, both. I've been a fan of StepFun for a while. They keep grinding on actual office work while everyone else chases coding benchmarks. The model itself: 600B MoE, only 27B active, 1M context. It scored 44 on the AA intelligence index, good for top 3 among open models worldwide, and it's sitting at #1 on OpenRouter's call volume chart. Deep research, retrieval, data analysis, docs and slide decks, that's its turf.

freebuff, and the models are actually free.

There are more no-cost LLM sites than ever. freebuff's model is simple: text ads pay for inference, you pay nothing. No subscription, no credit card, not even an API key. Billing isn't per token either, it's per one-hour session. Each model has a session price, and once you're in you can send as many messages as you want that hour. Way nicer than watching a token counter tick down. The free tier gives you 25 Freebucks a day, about $0.25, and it resets the next day instead of rolling over. Same budget, wildly different runtime depending on the model you pick: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is roughly 1 hour a day per the official numbers, and Solar Mini 4 and Solar Pro 4 are listed as unlimited for now. The caveats, because there are some. Outside supported regions, or if they detect VPN/proxy, your daily budget drops to 20 Freebucks and the model list shrinks too. The ToS says your data may be used for training. Under heavy load some models might serve you a quantized version. It's also still beta, so prices and quotas move every few weeks, and their own fine print says sessions can get paused for "fair use" even while a free account still has balance. 🔗 https://freebuff.com/?ref=ref-b22b7bc3-a5cb-4e7c-8446-995e9d6c6dfe

2026-10-14

Muse registration is getting stricter and stricter.

Made another account to help run my overseas social media and content distribution. A lot of cloud browsers block the Muse homepage outright now, so most of the old tricks are dead. The two I can confirm still work: Gemini's Sprak cloud computer, and the built-in cloud browser that ships with Grok premium and up (not Grok-bot's cloud computer. The bot throws you into the waitlist even if you turn auto timezone off).

2026-10-14

I stuffed an agent into an Android phone.

You've probably run into those short videos lately where an agent drives a phone around by itself. This one is called Mika, and it's a free open-source project. It's an Android app that works in the background through accessibility mode, so it can use pretty much any other app you have installed. Reply to someone on WeChat, scroll Xiaohongshu, drop something in a cart and check out. It finds the buttons by looking at the screen. There's no API to wire up, and it doesn't care what resolution your phone is. When it reaches a payment step or a captcha it stops and lets you finish. 🔗 github.com/wangzan101/Mika

2026-11-01

My product went profitable, and something in me broke.

Someone on Xiaohongshu posted a while back that she sells phone keyboard skins she made with Codex. Eight, ten yuan a pack. Over a thousand a month. I've been at mine for months. October: a few hundred copies, $1,200 gross. Platform fee 30%, tax 10%, so 60% should have landed. It came to just over a thousand dollars. I still don't know how the math pulled that off. I have an overseas bank account. Once lost $500 to a wire transfer off one. I'd still tell you to take payout through WorldFirst: less hassle, lower fees. You can also get a Hong Kong USD credit card tied to it that spends your WorldFirst balance directly. Digital card is free. Physical is $4. Mainland purchases under ¥200 skip the processing fee, and right now there's 1% cashback.

2026-11-01