Open-source Jev alternatives Kev and Laya gain traction

After TypeSafe launched its closed decision-model Jev on September 15, 2026, more than a dozen open clones appeared within a week. The largest are Kev by Jared Palmer on Qwen3.5/3.8 (Apache-2.0, 0.8B to 27B) and Laya on ModernBERT (421M parameters, 19,000 GitHub stars). Kev-27B trails Jev by 0.006 points on new sources but loses on MMLU-Pro (0.675 vs 0.840).

• TypeSafe's Jev launched September 15, 2026: $0.042 per million input tokens, 70-500 ms responses
• Kev on Qwen3.5/3.8: Apache-2.0, four sizes from 0.8B to 27B, compatible with TypeSafe SDK
• Laya on ModernBERT: 421M parameters, 19,000 stars, +5,000 in a day, 21-33 ms responses
• Kev-27B: 0.851 vs Jev's 0.857 on new sources, but 0.675 vs 0.840 on MMLU-Pro