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Qwen

Alibaba's open-weight LLM family with a free multimodal chat assistant and low-cost API

4.4
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Pricing

Freemium

Company

Alibaba Cloud

Founded

2023

Qwen Chat free on web and mobile; API pay-as-you-go via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio and OpenRouter (e.g. Qwen3 Coder Flash ~$0.20/M input, ~$0.98/M output tokens); open-weight Qwen3 models free to self-host. Verified July 2026.

Pricing verified Jul 2026

Who It's For
Developers wanting low-cost OpenAI-compatible APIsTeams self-hosting open-weight LLMsUsers seeking a free ChatGPT alternative
Details
CompanyAlibaba Cloud
Founded2023
WebsiteVisit

About Qwen

Qwen is Alibaba's AI model family and assistant. The free Qwen Chat app (chat.qwen.ai) offers multimodal conversation, document analysis, and image understanding powered by the Qwen3.x generation, including Qwen3.5 Plus with a 1M-token context window. Developers can use an OpenAI-compatible API via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio or download open-weight Qwen3 models for self-hosting. Dedicated coding models (Qwen3 Coder) target agentic programming workloads.

Key Features

  • Free Qwen Chat assistant on web and mobile
  • Qwen3.x flagship models with up to 1M-token context
  • Open-weight models free for self-hosting
  • Dedicated agentic coding models (Qwen3 Coder)
  • OpenAI-compatible API via Alibaba Cloud Model Studio
  • Multimodal text, image, and video understanding

Pros & Cons

Pros

+ Strong open-weight ecosystem with permissive licensing

+ Among the cheapest frontier-class API pricing

+ Rapid release cadence across chat, coding, and multimodal models

Cons

- Consumer brand awareness lower outside Asia

- Model lineup and versioning can be confusing

- Enterprise compliance posture less documented for Western buyers

Use Cases

Free general-purpose AI chat and document Q&ACost-sensitive API workloads and agent pipelinesSelf-hosting open-weight models for data control

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