Qwen (Alibaba) Pricing
All plans and pricing as of 2026-04-27
Self-hosted (Free)
- ✓Apache 2.0 license on open weights
- ✓Available on Hugging Face, ModelScope, Ollama
- ✓Fine-tuning fully permitted
API (OpenRouter / Alibaba Cloud)
- ✓Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B-A3B: $0.12 in / $0.60 out
- ✓Qwen3.5-397B: $0.40 in / $2.40 out
- ✓Qwen3-Max (API only): $0.78 in / $6.00 out
API (Qwen 3.6-Plus flagship, Mar 30 2026)
- ✓Native 1M context window
- ✓Always-on chain-of-thought reasoning
- ✓Agentic tool-use baked in (matches Claude Opus 4.5 on SWE-bench per Alibaba Cloud)
- ✓API-only (weights not released)
API (Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview, Apr 20 2026 -- CLOSED WEIGHTS)
- ✓#1 on SWE-bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, SciCode, QwenClawBench, QwenWebBench
- ✓256K context window (text-only at launch, no vision)
- ✓OpenAI- and Anthropic-API-compatible endpoints
- ✓Alibaba's FIRST flagship shipped without open weights -- proprietary only
- ✓Available via Qwen Studio + Alibaba Cloud Model Studio
Self-hosted (Qwen3.6-27B dense, Apr 22 2026)
- ✓Apache 2.0 open weights -- no commercial restrictions
- ✓DENSE 27B (not MoE) -- all params active, simpler to deploy than sparse-MoE flagships
- ✓Multimodal: text + image + video, 262K native context (extensible to ~1M)
- ✓Runs on a single consumer-tier GPU (RTX 4090 or equivalent at FP16; smaller VRAM at quant)
- ✓BEATS Qwen3.5-397B-A17B MoE flagship on coding while being ~15x smaller in active params
Is Qwen (Alibaba) Worth the Price?
Value Score: 10/10
Overall Score: 8.8/10 · Developers who want frontier-tier open weights with Apache 2.0 licensing. Qwen3-Coder-Next is arguably the best local coding model; Qwen3.5-397B is a top-3 open generalist.
Qwen is the most complete open-weights family in 2026. Alibaba ships Apache-2.0 weights across text, coding, vision, and reasoning -- every modality has a top-tier entry. Qwen3-Coder-Next is a standout: 3B active params but competitive with Claude Sonnet on coding. The catch is that Qwen3-Max, the absolute flagship, stays closed. If you can live with the PRC content filters and want the best open-weights ecosystem, Qwen is the S-tier pick.
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How Qwen (Alibaba) Pricing Compares
| Tool | Free Tier | Starting Price | Value Score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen (Alibaba)(this tool) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.8 |
| MiniMax M2.7 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.4 |
| Gemma 4 (Google) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.3 |
| IBM Granite 4.0 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.2 |
| Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot) | Yes | $0 | 8.5/10 | 8.1 |
| gpt-oss (OpenAI) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.1 |