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Qwen: pricing, limits and what it's actually good at

Alibaba's Qwen assistant with open weights and cloud APIs

Made by	Alibaba
Official site	https://www.qianwen.com
Platforms	Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, HarmonyOS PC
Free tier	Yes
Pricing	Qianwen app free; API qwen3.8-max CNY 12 input and CNY 36 output per million tokens (Beijing region; CNY 1.5 on cache hits) (checked 2026-10-29)
Context window	1,000,000 tokens (qwen3.8-max; 991,808 max input, 131,072 max output) (checked 2026-10-29)
Non-English	Native Chinese with complete Chinese docs, and Chinese and English quality stay close to each other (checked 2026-10-29)
Availability	Directly reachable in mainland China with no proxy, and a China edition exists (checked 2026-10-29).

What Qwen does well

Balances Chinese and English quality on the same model
Table and office-document handling is the most complete here
Plugs into the Alibaba Cloud billing and IAM you already run
Open weights cover text, vision and audio variants

Where it falls short

Web and app do not offer the same features
Membership and API billing are hard to keep straight
Occasional throttling during Chinese peak hours

Who should use it

Chinese office documents and tables
Teams already running on Alibaba Cloud
Developers calling a China-hosted model

What it feels like day to day

If we have to deploy something behind our own firewall, this is the realistic option, since weights are open, API docs are complete, and it bills through the Alibaba Cloud account we already run. Chat feels less smooth than Doubao, but formal Chinese such as policy drafts and internal rules comes out more stable. What I dislike is the split, because a feature exists in the app and not on the web, so I check both before promising anything.

Compared with

No head-to-head page yet — see the full table.

FAQ

Is Qwen free?

Yes — there is a free tier you can start on. Whether it's enough depends on how much you use it; limits are on the official pricing page.

How much text can Qwen handle at once?

1,000,000 tokens (qwen3.8-max; 991,808 max input, 131,072 max output) (checked 2026-10-29)

Is Qwen available in my country?

Directly reachable in mainland China with no proxy, and a China edition exists (checked 2026-10-29).

Sources: https://help.aliyun.com/zh/model-studio/qwen3-8-max · https://www.qianwen.com · https://www.qianwen.com/download · https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/id6466733523 — checked 2026-10-29.