Hermes Agent gets StepFun Step 5 Preview free for one week via Nous Portal
StepFun put Step 5 Preview on Nous Research's Nous Portal for free. In Hermes Agent, pick stepfun/step-5-preview:free so input and output stay at $0. The free window started October 8 and should run through around October 15, the same week OpenCode, Cline, and Kilo Code opened free access.
The briefing
StepFun announced on October 8 that its flagship agentic model Step 5 Preview is live on Nous Research's Nous Portal and free to use for one week inside Hermes Agent. The model id is stepfun/step-5-preview:free — pick the variant with the :free suffix so you stay on the no-cost tier.
What you can use
The free window started on October 8 and is expected to end around October 15. Install Hermes Agent and sign in with a Nous Portal account. Some users report that Portal setup asks for a Stripe card; follow the Portal prompts if that shows up.
The same model also has free entries in OpenCode Zen, Cline, and Kilo Code during the same week, so you can pick the tool you already use.
Specs and public benchmarks
Step 5 Preview is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 600B total parameters and 27B active per token, a 1M-token context window, and up to 64K output tokens. It reads text, images, and video, and supports tool calls. StepFun aims it at software engineering and professional knowledge work, with financial analysis as a particular strength, and plans to release the weights on October 15.
On StepFun's published scores, Step 5 Preview reaches 67.7 on DeepSWE v1.1, 80.5 on ProgramBench, and 66.4 on FrontierFinance. Its Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score is 44.
See the Step 5 Preview product page for the full model write-up.
How to use
- Install Hermes Agent (desktop or CLI) and connect Nous Portal on the free plan.
- In the model picker, search for Step 5 Preview and select
stepfun/step-5-preview:free. In the CLI you can also switch with/model. - Start chatting or running tasks in Hermes.
More detail is in the Hermes Agent Nous Portal guide and at Nous Portal. For the same free week on other tools, see OpenCode Zen, Cline, and Kilo Code.