The $0.05 Floor: Why StepFun’s Cache-Read Rate Changes the Persistent Agent Equation

StepFun’s Step-5 Preview listing prices cache reads at $0.05 per million tokens. On the same axis, Meta’s Muse Wonder charges $0.20, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 charges $0.20 on its OpenRouter listing . Google’s Gemini 4 Argon enters at $2/$10 per million tokens for its introductory window before moving to $4/$20 on Dec 1, putting its standard cache-read tier in the same $0.20 cluster. That 4x gap between $0.05 and $0.20 per re-read is the structural difference that forces a pricing question: where does the cost of keeping context hot actually sit?

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