Qwen3.8 27B: what it costs to run
The price Alibaba (Qwen) lists for Qwen3.8 27B, what a support reply, a document summary and an agent task cost at it, and where that puts it among 37 models.
US dollars per million tokens, standard rate, shortest context band.
- 1,000 support replies
- $2.70
- Cached input
- Not published
- Context window
- 1,000,000 tokens
- Released
- Not published
- Weights
- Open
From Alibaba (Qwen)’s own pages, 22 September 2026.
Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.50 per million input tokens and $3 per million output tokens on Alibaba (Qwen)’s own API. At those prices 1,000 support replies cost $2.70, the 12th cheapest of 33 priced models on our list. It reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once.
What a job costs
Three jobs, 1,000 runs of each, at the list price above, and where each puts Qwen3.8 27B among the 33 models with a list price.
| Job | 1,000 runs | Among 33 |
|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $2.70 | 12th cheapest |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $15.50 | 12th cheapest |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $49.00 | 14th most expensive |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are Alibaba (Qwen)’s. All three jobs stay under 200,000 tokens a request, below every long-context surcharge on the list. Alibaba (Qwen) publishes no cache price for this model, so the agent task bills its repeated context at the full input rate.
Qwen3.8 27B on real small-business tasks
What the AIGROW benchmark measured when Qwen3.8 27B was given 20 office tasks, each marked pass or fail by fixed checks.
- Success rate
- 80% of 20 runs passed (95% interval 58 to 92%), 18th of 36 models.
- Cost per 1,000 passes
- $7.30, failed runs included.
- Answer time
- 43 s median, 89 s at the 90th percentile.
- Strongest and weakest
- Bookkeeping (100% passed) and review replies (0%).
The small print
What the base rate above leaves out, copied from the maker’s pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
Open-source model with a first-party hosted price (listed under 'Qwen (open source)'). International deployment, one tier up to 1M input tokens. Context taken from the top pricing tier (1M).
Qwen3.8 27B against the models it is weighed with
Each comparison puts both list prices side by side and costs the same three jobs on each.
- vs Muse Glimmer 30B
- Meta's local model against Qwen's, both roughly 30B and open weight.
- vs Gemma 4 31B
- Mid-size open-weight models that businesses consider for private deployment, only one of which has a first-party API price.
Other Alibaba (Qwen) models
| Model | Input | Output | Context | 1,000 replies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 FlashAlibaba (Qwen) | $0.15 | $0.47 | 1M | $0.64 |
| Qwen3.7 PlusAlibaba (Qwen) | $0.40 | $1.60 | 1M | $1.84 |
| Qwen3.8 MaxAlibaba (Qwen) | $2.00 | $6.00 | 1M | $8.40 |
Where the price comes from
- Alibaba (Qwen)
- alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/model-pricing
Read on 22 September 2026. Each price is the standard rate for the shortest context band, with no batch or priority discount; long-context surcharges, batch rates and promotions are in each model’s small print. No price was taken from a reseller.
Pay a quarter of list price
AIGROW API credit is metered at the makers’ list prices, and $25 buys $100 of usage. The credit page lists the models it covers; ask about any other before buying.
Prices checked 22 September 2026