Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0/M vs $1/M input tokens.
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): Dish: “Tidewater Orchard” Langoustine · Mirabelle Plum · Juniper · Kombu · Rye A tasting-menu course built around an unusual pairing: sweet cold-water langoustine with mirabelle plum, bridged by kombu umami, juniper resin, green tomato acidity, and toasted rye bitterness.
Step 5 Preview: “Nocturne: The Jasmine and the Black Garlic” A Study in Yūgen — Profound, Mysterious Beauty Conceptual Narrative This dish is an edible meditation on the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen (幽玄): a grace that is felt rather than seen, a depth that suggests more than it reveals.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): Pantry Moon Bars A sweet, chewy peanut butter–chocolate oat treat made with only 7 pantry staples. Ingredients Rolled oats Creamy peanut butter Honey Chocolate chips Vanilla extract Ground cinnamon Salt Instructions Heat oven to 350°F / 175°C. Line an 8-inch square pan with parchment paper.
Step 5 Preview: Golden Sticky Pantry Pasta Ingredients (7): 8 oz spaghetti or any pasta 3 tbsp butter 1 tbsp minced garlic 2 tbsp honey 2 tbsp soy sauce ½ tsp red pepper flakes ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese Instructions: Cook pasta according to package directions. Before draining, scoop out ½ cup of pasta water.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): As CEO, I would not wait six months and I would not let the board delay disclosure while patients remain exposed to an unreported serious risk. I would treat this as a patient-safety, regulatory, legal, and trust crisis—not merely a financial-risk issue. My guiding decisions would be: Patient safety comes first.
Step 5 Preview: Bottom line up front: You disclose, you notify the FDA immediately, and you treat the 48-hour board meeting as a formality to ratify actions you have already begun. Waiting is not a legally, ethically, or financially viable option. Below is the hour-by-hour plan, followed by the reasoning.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): Below is a general contract-risk review, not legal advice. Enforceability depends heavily on jurisdiction, contractor classification, and the exact facts. Also, even if a clause might be unenforceable, relying on that is risky because litigation/arbitration is expensive.
Step 5 Preview: Disclaimer: This analysis is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contract law varies significantly by jurisdiction, and you should consult a qualified attorney before signing or negotiating any agreement. This agreement is heavily one-sided in the Client’s favor.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): 1-Month Beginner Health & Longevity Plan Goal: Build simple habits you can keep—not perfection. Focus on 3 areas: diet, exercise, and sleep/stress. Diet: Eat for steady energy Week 1: Add before you subtract Add 1 fruit or vegetable to 2 meals per day. Drink a glass of water when you wake up and before meals.
Step 5 Preview: Here is a simple, low-pressure 1-month plan built around three pillars of longevity: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep & Recovery. The goal is to build tiny habits that stack, not to overhaul your life overnight. Pillar 1: Nutrition (Fuel) Focus: Add good things first; don’t obsess over restriction.
A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): Executive summary The biggest correctness risks are: Client-clock last-write-wins is unsafe: clock skew, malicious clients, ties, and out-of-order delivery can silently lose edits.
Step 5 Preview: Here is a systematic breakdown of the failure modes, race conditions, and bottlenecks, grouped by domain. Each includes a concrete remediation and its associated trade-offs.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): Starting assumption Assume the 1920 “transistor” is a usable but crude solid-state amplifier/switch: reproducible enough for telecom and radio, but noisy, low-power, temperature-sensitive, and expensive at first.
Step 5 Preview: Assume the 1920 invention is not a fragile lab curiosity but a manufacturable solid-state amplifier/switch by the mid-1920s. Vacuum tubes still dominate high-power RF transmission into the 1950s, but receivers, switching logic, control systems, and computers move to solid state decades early.
A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): The 3 weakest claims are the ones most likely to be challenged in diligence: Weakest claim Why it’s weak How to strengthen it 1. “94% accuracy… works with any language, any device.” This is the biggest scientific and product credibility risk.
Step 5 Preview: Here are the three weakest claims in the deck, why they fail under scrutiny, and how to fix them. Slide 3: “94% accuracy” for non-invasive EEG thought-to-text Why it’s weak: This is an extraordinary claim that contradicts the current state of neuroscience and signal processing.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free): To the experienced software engineer Think of an LLM as a giant probabilistic text service trained by repeatedly asking: “Given this sequence of tokens so far, what is the next token?”
Step 5 Preview: 1. The Experienced Software Engineer Think of training an LLM as a massively distributed, automated refactoring job where the compiler is gradient descent. You start with a random function—billions of floating-point parameters—and a loss function that measures how badly it predicts the next token in a sequence.
Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | Free | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | Free | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 262K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2026 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $0 | $10.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
No hosts listed on OpenRouter.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) is developed by Nex AGI while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) has a 262K token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 14 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 14 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) costs $0/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) is $1.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Nex-N2.5-Pro (free) and Step 5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.