Yep Kilo (and Cline/Roo more recently) push these free trial of the week models really hard, partially as incentive to register an account with their cloud offering. I began using Cline and Roo before "cloud" features were even a thing and still haven't bothered to register, but I do play with the free Kilo models when I see them since I'm already signed in (they got me with some kind of register and spend $5 to get $X model credits deal) and hey, it's free (I really don't care about my random personal projects being used for training).

If xAI in particular is in the mood to light cash on fire promoting their new model, you'll see it everywhere during the promo period, so not surprised that heavily boosts xAI stats. The mystery codename models of the week are a bit easier to miss.

Yeah, the speed and price are why I use it. I find that any LLM is garbage at writing code unless it gets constant high-entropy feedback (e.g. an MCP tool reporting lint errors, a test, etc.) and the quality of the final code depends a lot more on how well the LLM was guided than the quality of the model.

A bad model with good automated tooling and prompts will beat a good model without them, and if your goal is to build good tooling and prompts you need a tighter iteration loop.

Non free has double usage than free. Free one uses your data for training.

I mean, I can kinda roll through a lot of iterations with this model without worrying about any AI limits.

Y'know with all these latest models, the lines are kinda blurry actually. The definition of "good" is being foggy.

So it might as well be free as the definition of money is clear as crystal.

I also used it for some time to test on something really really niche like building telegram bot in cloudflare workers and grok-4-fast was kinda decent on that for the most part actually. So that's nice.