Qwen API pricing: every model, every rate

By the aitokensai editors · Verified 2026-11-02 Sources: Qwen docs

Qwen is the largest non-US model family by parameter spread, from 0.6B up to Max tiers. Below is every billable variant.

Full rate card

90 billable models in total, 47 of them text models. On those text models: 0 of 47 carry a rate verified against Alibaba's own published pricing, the remaining 47 are gateway rates only. USD per 1M tokens, checked 2026-11-02.

On Alibaba the Out/In column runs 2.5× to 12.0×, median 4.0× It outweighs the input price as soon as output dominates your bill.

Across 47 priced text models the blended rate spans $0.125 (qwen-turbo) to $15 (qwen3-coder) per 1M tokens, a 120× spread. At 120× between its own cheapest and dearest, picking the wrong tier inside Alibaba costs more than picking the wrong vendor.

How these rates were verified

Alibaba publishes no USD rate card we could confirm against, so none of the 90 prices above is cross-checked with vendor documentation — every figure is a gateway rate read from the live rate config on 2026-11-02. That is the reason no discount percentage appears anywhere on this page: without a published list to compare against, a "saving" would be a number we made up. Read these as an observed snapshot of what the endpoint charges today, and treat the reason to route Alibaba through one endpoint as access and consolidated billing rather than a discount.

What Alibaba costs at three usage levels

Priced on qwen3.8-max at $1 in / $3 out per 1M tokens, with a 5:1 input-to-output ratio (roughly what an interactive workload produces).

This is the model we cover in depth for this vendor. Swap in your own token split in the calculator.

Same budget, other vendors

3 models from 3 other vendors priced within 35% of qwen3.8-max on a blended rate, the cheapest, the dearest and one in between. This is the horizontal check a Alibaba rate page on its own cannot give you.

Blended comparison (input + output per 1M tokens). Price is one axis (none of these is a Alibaba model), so treat them as candidates to test side by side at this budget rather than drop-in substitutes.

Why the output rate decides the bill

Across the 46 priced Alibaba text models, the output rate runs from 2.5× to 12.0× the input rate, with a median of 4.0×. On Alibaba that multiple lands on the smaller half of the token count and the larger half of the bill, because output is what a chat or agent turn actually produces.

Worked out: at a 4.0× multiple, a job whose token count is 80% input still spends 50% of its cost on the output it generates. Setting Alibaba beside any other vendor on the input rate alone hides that.

What Alibaba is good at

Qwen coder models are strong enough for agentic work and priced well below comparable US models.

Detailed pages for Alibaba models

The models we cover in depth, each with worked cost at three usage levels and a comparison against similarly priced alternatives.

• Qwen3.8 Max — $1 / $3 per 1M tokens

Routing these rates into your tools

Every model above is reachable from the same OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so the rates on this page apply wherever you already work. These are the tools we have profiled end to end — Alibaba models included:

Every one of these takes the same two values, a base URL and a key, and none of them require changing your code beyond where the client is constructed. Pointed at Alibaba, that is the whole change. The differences that matter are in each tool's defaults, which is what each guide covers.

Other vendors

Every rate card here is built the same way, from the same price snapshot (2026-11-02), so the numbers are comparable across vendors:

Anthropic · OpenAI · Google · DeepSeek · xAI · Zhipu · Moonshot · Meta · MiniMax · ByteDance

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See all 38 models → or use the cost calculator with your own token split.