Alibaba Qwen · AI model API pricing

How much does Qwen-Plus cost?

Alibaba's balanced tier — matches MiniMax M3 on output and undercuts every Western mid-tier model.

Rate card

What that means per month

Standard on-demand rates from Alibaba Qwen's official Model Studio pricing, last checked 2026-07-27. Rates shown are for prompts ≤256k tokens; from 256k to 1M, input is $1.20 and output $3.60 per 1M. Implicit context cache is automatic and cannot be disabled: cached input reads bill at 20% of the input rate and cache creation bills at the standard rate (no write premium). Opting into the explicit cache instead reads at 10% but bills creation at 125%. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.

Where Qwen-Plus sits on price

At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, Qwen-Plus costs $7.60, which makes it the 8th cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 4.5× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among the 11 mid-tier models it ranks 2nd, behind MiniMax M3 at $6.60.

Cache economics

Cached input on Qwen-Plus bills at $0.08 per 1M — 20% of its own input rate, against a 10% median across the models here that publish a cached-read price. 25 models discount cached reads more steeply than this. On the reference month, serving 80% of that input from cache takes the input side of the bill from $4 to $1.44, leaving output untouched at $3.60 — which is why a high reuse rate changes the ranking above rather than just shaving the total.

Cache reads only. Writes are billed separately by some providers and are excluded here — see the rate note above for Alibaba Qwen's terms. Try it at your own hit rate on the AI cost calculator.

Cheaper alternatives

At a reference workload of 10M input / 3M output tokens a month, these cost less than Qwen-Plus ($7.60/mo):

• Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite $7/mo
• MiniMax M3 $6.60/mo
• GPT-5.4 Nano $5.75/mo

Qwen-Plus head-to-head