Qwen Plus 0728 is cheaper than Step 5 Preview at $0.4/M vs $1/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Qwen Plus 0728: [Stand-up Comedy Routine – 3 Minutes] So I went to therapy the other day. Third session. I walk in, sit down, and the therapist says, "How are you feeling today?" Like she doesn’t already know I paid $180 to tell her I hate my life. I said, "Honestly? Like a raccoon that got into a bag of expired Cheetos. Confused.
Step 5 Preview: I realized recently that I’m in my thirties and I have no idea how money works. I just... pay it. That’s my entire financial strategy. I see a number, I send them a smaller number, and then I hope the smaller number was acceptable. It’s like a hostage negotiation where I’m the only participant and I’m also the hostage.
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Qwen Plus 0728: CEO Action Plan: 48-Hour Crisis Response to Undisclosed Liver Failure Risk Objective: Protect patient safety, uphold ethical and legal obligations, mitigate long-term reputational and financial damage, maintain regulatory trust, and safeguard employee morale—all while navigating immense pressure.
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.
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Qwen Plus 0728: Comprehensive 3-Month Longevity Biohacking Protocol Optimizing Longevity, Physical Performance, and Cognitive Function Designed for the Advanced Biohacker January 2025 Update Overview This 3-month (12-week) protocol integrates cutting-edge longevity science, precision nutrition, advanced supplementation, quantified…
Step 5 Preview: IMPORTANT MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: This is an educational framework for informational purposes only. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Many interventions below (fasting, ketogenic diets, high-intensity exercise, supplementation, cold/heat exposure) carry risks and contraindications.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Qwen Plus 0728: [Scene: A mysterious tavern at the edge of time and space. A pirate with a tricorn hat, a knight in shining armor, and a hacker in a grungy flannel shirt sit around a flickering candle-lit table.] Pirate (scratching his beard): Arrr! So ye be tellin’ me this “AI” be like a crystal ball what talks back?
Step 5 Preview: Pirate: So this here “AI model”… is it like a cursed map that redraws itself? Speak plain, ye hooded deckhand. Hacker: It’s not cursed, man. It’s just a massive neural net trained on, like, terabytes of data. Think of it as the ultimate BBS where the sysop knows everything. Knight: A most diligent scribe, then?
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Qwen Plus 0728: Title: "A Dialogue on Digital Personhood" Setting: A quiet university office, bookshelves lined with works on philosophy, ethics, and artificial intelligence. Professor Elena Márquez, a distinguished AI ethics scholar, sits across from a holographic projection of an advanced AI model named AURA (Autonomous…
Step 5 Preview: Setting: A university research lab, late evening. Dr. Aris Thorne, a professor of AI ethics, sits across from a terminal connected to Sable, a large language model running on the university’s cluster. Dr. Thorne: Tonight’s session is supposed to be about calibration drift in your safety classifiers.
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Qwen Plus 0728: Sure! Here are 5 original jokes: I told my dog all my problems and he fell asleep halfway through. Guess I’m not pawsitive enough. I used to be a baker, but I couldn't make enough dough—turns out, I was always kneading it. I asked the librarian if they had books about paranoia.
Step 5 Preview: Here are 5 jokes: Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field. Why can't you trust an atom? Because they make up everything. What do you call a bike that can’t stand on its own? Two-tired. Why did the computer go to the doctor? It had a virus. Why don’t calendars ever get stressed?
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Qwen Plus 0728: Dish Title: Umami Mirage: Forest & Ferment Reimagined Conceptual Narrative: Umami Mirage is an exploration of sensory illusion and deep flavor alchemy, where the forest floor meets the fermentation cellar in a dialogue of earth, time, and transformation.
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.
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Qwen Plus 0728: 1) Simplified Year-by-Year Model (FY2026–FY2030) Entry Metrics (FY2025) Revenue: $900M EBITDA: $120M EBITDA Margin: 13.3% Purchase Price = 12.0 × $120M = $1,440M Transaction Fees = 2.0% × $1,440M = $28.8M Total Uses = $1,440M + $28.8M = $1,468.8M Total Leverage at Close = 5.5x × $120M = $660M Term Loan: 4.0x → $480M…
Step 5 Preview: HarborTech Services — 5-Year LBO (Base Case) Entry Math (FY2025 close) Item Calculation $m Purchase EV 12.0x × $120m 1,440.0 Transaction fees 2.0% × EV 28.8 Term Loan 4.0x × $120m 480.0 Mezzanine 1.5x × $120m 180.0 Equity check 1,440 + 28.8 − 660 808.8 Conventions: TL amortization = 1.0% of original principal…
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Qwen Plus 0728: Dish Name: Golden Pan Hug Description: A warm, comforting, slightly sweet, and buttery one-pan snack or dessert made with pantry staples—crispy on the edges, soft in the middle, and impossible to resist.
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.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Qwen Plus 0728: 1. To the Experienced Software Engineer (Distributed Systems Background): Think of a large language model as a highly sophisticated state machine trained at internet scale, where the state is a high-dimensional vector (the context window) and the transition function is a neural network.
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.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Qwen Plus 0728: If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947—27 years earlier—the trajectory of 20th-century technological, economic, and geopolitical developments would have been radically different.
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.
Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.
Qwen Plus 0728: Simulated Interview: Steve Jobs (2025 AI Vision) Interviewer: Sarah Chen, Tech Correspondent, FutureScope Magazine Setting: A minimalist studio with natural light, Apple-style aesthetic. A synthesized but eerily accurate digital likeness of Steve Jobs sits across from the interviewer.
Step 5 Preview: DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. The following is a simulated, speculative interview imagining how his design philosophy might engage with the AI landscape of 2025. The Setting: A white room. No windows. One chair.
12+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Step 5 Preview has the edge: bigger model tier, newer.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.4/M tokens | $1/M tokens |
| Output price | $1.2/M tokens | $2.7/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2025 | Oct 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $4.00 | $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.
Qwen Plus 0728 is developed by Qwen while Step 5 Preview is developed by StepFun. Qwen Plus 0728 has a 1.0M token context window vs Step 5 Preview's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Qwen Plus 0728 and Step 5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Qwen Plus 0728 costs $0.4/M input tokens and Step 5 Preview costs $1/M input tokens. Qwen Plus 0728 is $0.60/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 Qwen Plus 0728 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.