Cerebras Code

Cerebras Code is a subscription from chipmaker Cerebras that sells fast inference on one open coding model at $50/month (Pro) and $200/month (Max). The pitch is speed, and the record shows the speed claim and the quota fine print are the two things to verify before paying.

What it is

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A hosted coding-inference plan on Cerebras wafer-scale hardware, consumed by pointing any OpenAI-compatible editor or agent (Cline, OpenCode, Crush, Cursor) at a Cerebras API key. It launched August 1, 2025 with Qwen3-Coder-480B advertised at up to 2,000 tokens per second and a 131k context window. As of 2026-09-26 the product page promotes GLM 4.7 at “1,000 tokens+ per second”, so the headline model has already been swapped once.

Status

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Launched August 1, 2025 and drew 449 points and 172 comments on Hacker News the same day. Launch windows sold out repeatedly, and as of 2026-09-26 both Pro and Max are marked “sold out” on cerebras.ai/code, with a limited free trial still open. The model changed from Qwen3-Coder to GLM 4.7 between launch and now, which shows the plan follows whichever open model is fastest rather than committing to one family. I could not verify funding or subscriber counts.

Strengths

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• Speed is genuinely differentiated: even its harshest reviewer calls Cerebras the fastest provider of its model, bar none.
• Flat monthly pricing with published daily allowances (24M tokens Pro, 120M Max) instead of per-token anxiety.
• Bring-your-own-editor stance with OpenAI-compatible endpoints, no proprietary IDE lock-in.
• By October 2025 the original tokens-per-minute caps had been raised in response to criticism.

Cautions

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• The marketing number did not survive contact: InfoWorld measured well under 500 tokens/second and often under 100, against the “up to 2,000” claim.
• Undocumented throttles drove the experience: 300k TPM on Pro and 400k on Max produced 429 errors mid-session, and an early buyer reported a 7.5M-token daily cap hidden behind an advertised 1,000-request limit.
• 131k context is about half the model’s native window and demands careful context management.
• At launch there was no prompt caching, which made agent loops expensive at the $2/1M API rate, and the usage console had defects (a Max purchase provisioning as Pro).
• Cerebras declined InfoWorld’s request for comment on these issues.

Pricing

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Pro costs $50/month with up to 24M tokens/day, and Max costs $200/month with up to 120M tokens/day. Both plans were marked sold out as of 2026-09-26; a free tier with limited tokens remains for connection testing. The underlying API price at launch was $2 per 1M input and $2 per 1M output on Qwen3-Coder. The current per-token table on cerebras.ai/pricing renders client-side and I could not extract it, so treat current API rates as unverified.

Price history

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Compared to

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• - Chutes is the cheap multi-model pay-as-you-go option; choose Chutes for price and variety, Cerebras when seconds per response matter.
• - GLM Coding Plan undercuts Cerebras on quota per dollar and now serves the same GLM family; choose it for volume, Cerebras for raw tokens per second.

Bottom line

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Recommended for developers whose bottleneck is iteration latency and who code in bursts that fit the daily token allowance. Not for heavy all-day agent runs, where the TPM throttles and 131k context cut the advertised advantage. Claim to disagree with: at the documented throttles, Max at $200 was worse value than four Pro accounts, because 4x300k TPM beats 400k TPM.

Changes

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• 2026-09-26 - Created.

See also

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• - Chutes - the low-price multi-model alternative.
• - GLM Coding Plan - the quota-heavy alternative now running the same model family.
• - Cline - the editor integration Cerebras documents first.
• - OpenCode - a terminal harness that consumes Cerebras keys.
• - Model provider feature matrix - where Cerebras Code sits among access providers.

References

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• https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/introducing-cerebras-code - launch post: $50/$200 tiers, 24M/120M tokens/day, 2,000 tok/s claim, 131k context (fetched, HTTP 200).
• https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/qwen3-coder-480b-is-live-on-cerebras - Qwen3-Coder launch, $2/1M API rate, “20x higher coding speed” claim (fetched, HTTP 200).
• https://www.cerebras.ai/code - current product page: GLM 4.7 at 1,000+ tok/s, Pro and Max both marked “sold out” (fetched, HTTP 200, as of 2026-09-26).
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762959 - launch-day reception: 449 points, 172 comments, top comment flags missing caching (fetched, HTTP 200).
• https://www.infoworld.com/article/4055909/ - critical review, Sep 15, 2025: disputed tok/s claims, TPM caps, 131k context, billing mixups, no vendor comment (fetched, HTTP 200).
• https://www.infoworld.com/article/4075825/how-to-vibe-code-for-free-or-almost-free.html - follow-up: caps improved, Qwen3 deprecated for GLM-4.6, “fastest bar none” (fetched, HTTP 200).
• https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mfeazc/ - critical post, Aug 2, 2025: advertised 1,000 requests/day actually a 7.5M-token cap, “request” defined at ~8k tokens (retrieved, HTTP 200, via the Arctic Shift archive API).