Alibaba · API pricing
Qwen 3.8 pricing
Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max on July 19, 2026 and did not publish a per-token price for it. There is no dollars-per-million-tokens figure to quote, because one does not exist yet — anyone showing you one made it up. Here is what you can actually pay today, and what the rest of the Qwen line costs while you wait.
The short answer
- No per-token API pricing. Qwen3.8-Max Preview is not on the standard pay-as-you-go price list, and it does not appear in OpenRouter's Qwen catalogue as of July 20, 2026.
- Access is by subscription. The preview ships through Alibaba's Token Plan and the Qoder / QoderWork developer platforms, billed in credits rather than tokens.
- Preview usage is discounted to 10% of the standard rate for the duration of the trial period.
- Open weights are promised — with no date, no license named, and no model card published.
What Alibaba confirmed
- Announced
- July 19, 2026, at WAIC in Shanghai
- Parameters
- 2.4 trillion
- Modalities
- Text, images, video and documents — the first Qwen above 1T parameters to go multimodal
- Availability
- Token Plan subscription, Qoder and QoderWork
- Preview rate
- 10% of the standard price during the trial
- Positioning claim
- “Second only to Fable 5”
Unconfirmedspecs Everything below the headline is missing: no model card, no activated-parameter count, no context window, and no benchmark scores at all behind the “second only to Fable 5” claim. For reference, the previous flagship — Qwen3.7-Max, May 2026 — scored 56.6 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Treat the ranking claim as marketing until independent numbers land.
What the subscription costs
Alibaba launched an individual tier of Token Plan alongside the preview. Prices below are the reported China list prices, in RMB per month, with the USD figures converted at the time of reporting — they are Unconfirmedas reported, not taken from a vendor price sheet we could reach.
| Individual tier | Per month | Approx. USD |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | ¥39 | ~$5.80 |
| Standard | ¥139 | ~$20.50 |
| Pro | ¥499 | ~$73.70 |
Team seats are reported at ¥150, ¥550 and ¥1,398 per seat per month. On top of the tier price, credit consumption is discounted 90% during daytime hours, and individual subscribers get a further 80% off at night — so the effective rate swings by an order of magnitude depending on when your jobs run. That promotional structure is the reason a stable per-token number does not exist yet.
Qwen models you can price per token
If you are costing out a build today, these are the Qwen models with real published rates. Qwen3.7 Max is the closest thing to a proxy for where 3.8 lands — it is the outgoing flagship, at $1.475 in and $4.425 out per 1M tokens.
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8-Max Preview | Not published — subscription only | Not published | |
| Qwen3.7 Max | $1.475 | $4.425 | 1M |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | $0.320 | $1.280 | 1M |
| Qwen3.5 Plus | $0.300 | $1.800 | 1M |
| Qwen3.5 Flash | $0.065 | $0.260 | 1M |
Rates as listed on OpenRouter, retrieved July 20, 2026. Alibaba Cloud's own Model Studio rates can differ by region and by volume tier.
Cost calculator
Enter your monthly token volume to see what each tier would cost.
| Tier | Input cost | Output cost | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.7 Max | $1.48 | $0.885 | $2.36 |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | $0.32 | $0.256 | $0.576 |
| Qwen3.5 Plus | $0.30 | $0.36 | $0.66 |
| Qwen3.5 Flash | $0.065 | $0.052 | $0.117cheapest |
Estimates only — list prices, before any caching discount, batch pricing, or enterprise agreement.
What to watch for
Three things would turn this page from an explanation of an absence into a real price table: a model card with a context window and activated-parameter count; a Model Studio pay-as-you-go listing; and the open-weight release, which would let anyone self-host and reset the cost question entirely. Until then, the honest planning assumption is that 3.8 will not price below the outgoing flagship.
Also on this site: Kimi K3 pricing — the model Qwen3.8 was previewed three days after, and the one Chinese flagship that does publish a per-token rate — and GPT-5.6 pricing, the model Qwen3.8 is being benchmarked against on cost.
Sources
- SiliconANGLE — Alibaba previews Qwen3.8, claims it's second only to Claude Fable 5 — retrieved 2026-07-20
- The Decoder — Alibaba's Qwen takes on Kimi K3 with open-weight Qwen 3.8 — retrieved 2026-07-20
- BigGo Finance — Alibaba launches Token Plan individual tier, debuts Qwen3.8-Max preview — retrieved 2026-07-20
- OpenRouter — Qwen model catalogue (checked: no Qwen3.8 listing) — retrieved 2026-07-20
Figures on this page last checked against these sources on 2026-07-20. Vendors change pricing and specs without notice — if a number here disagrees with the vendor's own page, trust the vendor.