Qwen

LLM Platforms & APIs active ★ 4.4 usage-based · Free chat; API from $0.15 per 1M input tokens Free tier available Verified Oct 2026

Alibaba's Qwen model family and the free Qwen Chat app. The flagship models (Qwen3.8-Max, Qwen3.7-Plus) are API-only through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, while many smaller models, such as Qwen3.8-27B, are released as open weights under Apache 2.0.

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Use Cases

Self-hosting open-weight models for private or on-prem workloads
Low-cost API inference for agents and RAG pipelines
Fine-tuning small open models for a narrow task
Multilingual chat and translation, especially Chinese and English
Vision and screen-understanding tasks with the multimodal models

Pros

Wide range of open-weight model sizes under the permissive Apache 2.0 license
Low API prices, with a 1M-token context on Qwen3.7-Plus
Free Qwen Chat with no subscription tiers
Supported almost everywhere open models run (Ollama, Hugging Face, inference hosts)

Cons

The top flagship models are no longer released as open weights
Hosted API runs on Alibaba Cloud, which may raise data-residency questions
Fast, confusing release cadence with many overlapping model names
Some organizations restrict Chinese-developed models for compliance reasons

Pricing

Plan	Price
Qwen Chat	Free
Qwen3.8-Flash API (input)	$0.15/1M tokens
Qwen3.7-Plus API (input, up to 256K context)	$0.4/1M tokens
Qwen3.8-Max API (input)	$2/1M tokens

Comparisons

Qwen vs DeepSeekBoth are leading Chinese open-weight model makers. Qwen offers a broader range of model sizes and modalities for self-hosting; DeepSeek focuses on a few large reasoning-strong models with very low API prices.Qwen vs Mistral AIMistral is the European open-weight option with stronger EU data-residency positioning. Qwen has more model sizes and generally leads on multilingual and coding benchmarks at similar sizes.