LLM Reference

Step 3.5 Flash

Released
2026-01-29
Last refreshed
2026-05-29
Status
Researched 45d ago
Open SourceLong context

Step 3.5 Flash is worth evaluating for long context when its provider route and context window match the workload.

Use it for

  • Teams evaluating long context
  • Workloads that can use a 256k context window
  • Buyers comparing 1 tracked provider route

Do not use it for

  • Vision or document-understanding workloads
  • Strict JSON or tool-calling flows
Specifications
Family
Step
Released
2026-01-29
Context
256k
Parameters
196B (11B active)
Architecture
Mixture of Experts
Specialization
general
Training
pretrained
Created by

One of China's leading AI 'Six Tigers'.

Shanghai, China
Founded 2023
Website
Pricing
Output / 1M
$0.300
Input / 1M
$0.100

Cheapest of 1 route · OpenRouter

About

Step 3.5 Flash is StepFun's most capable open-source foundation model. Its sparse Mixture of Experts architecture activates only 11B of 196B total parameters per token, making it highly efficient at long contexts. Achieves 60.47% on SWE-Bench Verified and 56.2% on SWE-Pro, competing with frontier closed models on agentic coding benchmarks. Supports 256K token context.

Step 3.5 Flash is an open-source model in the Step family. The structured metadata tracks a 256k-token context window and reasoning. This page tracks provider routes through OpenRouter, with the cheapest tracked route listed at $0.1 input and $0.3 output per 1M tokens. No headline benchmark score is tracked for Step 3.5 Flash yet.

Top use-case fit

Long context

Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.

Provider price ladder

Compare API pricing across 1 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.

ProviderInput / 1MOutput / 1MRoute
OpenRouter$0.100$0.300
Serverless

Capabilities

Reasoning

Benchmark peer barsfor Long context

No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.

Migration checks

No linked migration route is available for this model yet.

Rankings & picks(8)

Comparison and alternatives

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