Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s

Even trying it out, it seems like our account has gotten moved to some limbo where we can no longer add billing information.

``` Billing access restricted Self-serve billing is not available on Enterprise accounts. Please contact your team for further questions. ```

We have no team (they removed themself from our slack channel after we talked about rate limits). Perplexingly, none of this even shows up in the request, which gives:

``` {"message":"Model does not exist or you do not have access to it.","type":"not_found_error","param":"model","code":"model_not_found"} ```

When the error is really about billing.

I always want to like Cerebras, but I get the vibe that as a tokens in tokens out consumer you are not valued at all.

They do appear to host other models on OpenRouter so maybe Qwen3.8 will be there soon: https://openrouter.ai/provider/cerebras

For comparison, I ran the same task with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, which finished in 172 seconds and cost $0.024 with a final context window size of 55217 tokens, while Qwen3.8-27B was not even close to being done with a 64178 context window.

This is a very efficient way to burn your money, but I would not recommend it for programming.

On the positive side, I got a $5 signup bonus, so it wasn't my own money.

The net effect is that I spend about the same time waiting, and I still need to read that output so, at least for coding, it actually reconciles me with the 100-200t/sec you can get on DS4 or the like. Maybe that's a good sweet spot after all and faster t/sec is not where the bottleneck is.

Also maybe my setup (OMP) doesn't do the cache correctly but that's a huge cost driver... so atm it's quite pricy

Edit: it looks like this is only available on a API token pricing. Does anyone know if they have rolled out prompt caching yet? It used to get pretty expensive for agentic coding tasks with no prompt caching.

For those who haven't noticed though, the context size they allow for Qwen is just 128k. Still interesting as a specialized sub-agent but not really well suited for long tasks.

The Cerebras session cost me $1.60 and took a total of 5.1 mins. I did get a few brief 429 rate limit errors in there. The p50 speed was 890 tok/s and 0.64s TTFT.

Using OpenRouter averages, that would've cost $0.29 (no cache discount at Cerebras!) and would've taken about 14.4 minutes.

So on this one short session, cerebras was 5.6x more expensive in exchange for being 2.8x faster. Or, another way, $1.32 buys back about 9 minutes of your time. Not a bad trade IMHO but the cache situation is a real bummer. The longer your session the more relatively expensive Cerebras gets. The "good" news is you're also limited by its short context window.

(Also, I used to be on the Cerebras coding plan and the support is pretty bad for end users. My guess is these public endpoints are really just product demos for potential enterprise customers.)

(update: I got my answer. support@ replied and said my email domain is on their blacklist. It was just me (and I've resolved it)).

Sure, 4x input , but cheaper output. Though Cerebras doesn't have prompt caching, so not great for agentic workloads. (they do, but it doesn't affect the price.

Hope they add such models to Code too :)

Psychopaths: tok/SEC