Alibaba Qwen · AI model API pricing

How much does Qwen3-Max cost?

Alibaba's flagship — the cheapest frontier-class entry point in this table at short prompt lengths.

Rate card

What that means per month

Standard on-demand rates from Alibaba Qwen's official Model Studio pricing, last checked 2026-07-27. Pricing is tiered by input length: $1.20/$6 up to 32k tokens, $2.40/$12 to 128k, $3/$15 to 256k. Figures here use the ≤32k tier; batch runs at 50%. 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 Qwen3-Max sits on price

At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, Qwen3-Max costs $30, which makes it the 18th cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 18× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among the 10 frontier-class models it ranks 2nd, behind GLM-5.2 at $27.2.

Cache economics

Cached input on Qwen3-Max bills at $0.24 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 $12 to $4.32, leaving output untouched at $18 — 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 Qwen3-Max ($30/mo):

• GLM-5.2 $27.2/mo
• DeepSeek V4 Pro $25.1/mo
• Claude Haiku 4.5 $25/mo

Qwen3-Max head-to-head