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. Facts below verified as of 2026-09-26.

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).