Qwen API pricing: every model, every rate

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

88 billable models in total, 47 of them text models. On those text models: 0 carry a rate verified against the vendor's own published pricing, the rest are gateway rates only. USD per 1M tokens, checked 2026-09-16.

Output is billed at a multiple of input on most models. The Out/In column is that multiple — it matters more than the input price once 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. Picking the wrong tier is usually the single most expensive mistake here.

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 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 single-vendor pricing page cannot give you.

Blended comparison (input + output per 1M tokens). Price is one axis — these are the models worth testing side by side at this budget, not interchangeable 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×. Output tokens are what a chat or agent turn produces — on a typical workload they are the smaller half of the token count but the larger half of the bill.

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. Comparing vendors 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

Other vendors

Every rate card here is built the same way, from the same price snapshot (2026-09-16), so the numbers are comparable across vendors:

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

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See all 827 models → or use the cost calculator with your own token split.