Full 25-provider audit against live provider APIs, official catalogs and deprecation notices. The catalog goes from 271 to 253 models: 46 dead or now-paid models removed, 28 fresh free coding models added, 9 metadata fixes.
Added
- Step 5 Preview lands on 4 gateways: Kilo (
stepfun/step-5-preview-free, S, 1M ctx), OpenCode Zen (step-5-preview-free), llm7 and Pollinations - the StepFun flagship preview is this week's big free-model rollout. - Ling 3.1 Flash (560B-A25B MoE) replaces the retired Ling 3.0 :free slots on OpenRouter ($0/$0), Kilo, OpenCode Zen, Requesty, Novita and Vercel AI Gateway (
ling-3.1-flash-free). - Glyph Cluster, the new free stealth coding model, takes the stealth slot on Kilo and Vercel AI Gateway (Pixel Canary rotated out).
- llm7 rebuilds its free tier: + GLM-5.3-Flash (400k ctx, turbo tier), + Kimi K2.7 Code, + Kimi K2.6, + GPT-OSS 20B, + Nemotron 3 Nano 30B (1M ctx) - the catalog grows from 4 to 8 models.
- Novita reshuffles around the Qwen3.8 generation: + GLM-5.3-Flash (1M ctx), + Qwen3.8 Flash (1M ctx), + Ling 3.0 Flash, + GLM-4.7-Flash, + MiniMax M2.7.
- Pollinations: + OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol (S+, 1M ctx), + xAI Grok 4.7 (S, 500k ctx), + StepFun Step 5 Preview (A+, 1M ctx).
- onomeo: + Gemini 3.6 Flash (S+, 1M ctx) and + Hunyuan 4 Preview (1M ctx), replacing the removed Hunyuan 3 slot.
- Mistral La Plateforme: + Mistral Vibe CLI (new free coding model) and + Leanstral 1.5.1 (successor of Leanstral 1.5).
- Ollama Cloud: + Mistral Large 4 (1.05T MoE, 1M ctx, ~Oct 4 release).
- OpenRouter: + Apodex 1.1 Mini (
:free, 262k ctx).
Changed
- qwen (Alibaba DashScope): 5 models retired exactly today, 2026-10-10, as predicted by the in-file deprecation notices: qwen3.6-max-preview, qwen3-coder-plus, qwen3-coder-next, qwen3-coder-480b-a35b-instruct and qwen3-coder-30b-a3b-instruct (notices 1949/1950), plus qwen3-vl-flash. Also dropped the phantom qwen3.8-flash-next (404 detail page, never existed in the product index). 29 -> 22 models.
- onomeo: 16 of 33 models removed following the provider's own removed list, and mirrored ids renamed to first-party ones (
openai/gpt-oss-20b->gpt-oss-20b,z-ai/glm-5.3-flash-free->glm-5.3-flash,meta/muse-glimmer-30b->muse-glimmer-30b). 5 remaining models are flagged as upstream-paused. - nvidia: the 3 models re-added on 2026-09-29 are ghost catalog entries again (page 404 + absent from the hosted list): Kimi K2.6, Nemotron Nano 3 30B, Codestral 22B removed; 16 -> 13 models.
- sambanova: MiniMax M2.7 and M3 went paid-only - the official Free Tier table now covers exactly 5 models, the MiniMax pair needs a linked payment method (Developer Tier). 7 -> 5 models.
- kilo: hard free-tier rotation - qwen3.8-27b:free, step-3.7:free, ling-3.0-flash-sante:free and space-bunny-alpha gone; note: paid Poolside Laguna variants retire Oct 31, the free ones may follow.
- openrouter: qwen3.8-27b:free deleted from the live catalog, ling-3.0-flash-sante went paid, stealth/space-bunny-alpha rotated out.
- novita: the Qwen3.5/3.6 Plus tier was killed in favor of Qwen3.8 (2 removals).
- ovhcloud: Qwen3-Coder-30B is dead again (model_not_found on live probe). Warning from the audit: OVH now bills most text models per token - only a handful stay tagged Free on the catalog page.
- Moderation classifiers cleaned out of the coding catalog: Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety removed from OpenRouter, Kilo and Requesty (guardrail model, not coding-capable).
- README counts and the Top 8 provider table refreshed;
docs/providers.mdregenerated fromsources.js.
Fixed
- qwen omni context windows were wrong: qwen3.5-omni-plus 32k -> 256k, qwen3.8-omni-flash 32k -> 1M (official model pages).
- onomeo: gpt-oss-20b and muse-glimmer-30b ctx 128k -> 131k, minimax-m2.7 ctx 200k -> 205k (live catalog).
- kilo: openrouter/free ctx dropped (the live gateway no longer publishes a context length for the router).
Deliberately NOT added (audit transparency)
15 researcher-reported additions were skipped because they reversed verdicts already recorded in sources.js from earlier audits, with no stronger evidence: the 6 "free again" SiliconFlow small models (API needs a paid-check key to verify), 4 Pollinations models flagged "paid Pollen" on 2026-09-26/28 (the issue #190 trap: they return HTTP 200 with an embedded credits error, and this audit did not sniff completion bodies), QwQ 32B + R1-Distill on Cloudflare (supersession decision re-confirmed 2026-09-29), the twice-removed Mistral 7B v0.3 / Nemo 12B on OVHcloud, and gemini-3.1-pro-preview on Google AI (excluded twice as paid-only). All are documented in sources.js comments for the next audit to re-verify with live keys.