Last free day on a 256K-context model, and the open-source version is supposedly next — useful if the AI bill is real

Not a launch post and there's nothing here for you to buy. It's a cost thing with an end date, which might matter if you're pre-revenue.

inclusionAI, Ant Group's model lab, has Ling-3.0-flash listed on OpenRouter at $0, and per their announcement today is the last day of that. 262,144 token context, sparse mixture-of-experts so it's fast rather than merely cheap.

If there's something sitting on your list that you deferred purely on token cost — bulk cleanup of a scraped dataset, summarizing a year of support tickets, a first pass at a hundred landing page variants — this is a week where that costs you nothing but the time to set it up.

Two caveats worth more than the tip itself. It's weak on obscure factual recall, so don't put it anywhere a confident wrong specific reaches a customer. And the window ends today, so don't put a $0 line item into a unit economics model and call it a margin. Their launch post says an open-source release is coming without saying when, which would change the cost question entirely, but you can't budget against a maybe.

The way I'd use the week: run the batch, keep the output, go back to whatever you were paying for before