Qwen3.8 Max: what it costs to run
The price Alibaba (Qwen) lists for Qwen3.8 Max, 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
- $8.40
- Cached input
- Not published
- Context window
- 1,000,000 tokens
- Released
- Not published
- Weights
- Closed
From Alibaba (Qwen)’s own pages, 22 September 2026.
Qwen3.8 Max costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens on Alibaba (Qwen)’s own API. At those prices 1,000 support replies cost $8.40, the 12th most expensive 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 Max among the 33 models with a list price.
| Job | 1,000 runs | Among 33 |
|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $8.40 | 12th most expensive |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $56.00 | 12th most expensive |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $178 | 3rd 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 Max on real small-business tasks
What the AIGROW benchmark measured when Qwen3.8 Max was given 20 office tasks, each marked pass or fail by fixed checks.
- Success rate
- 85% of 20 runs passed (95% interval 64 to 95%), 10th of 36 models.
- Cost per 1,000 passes
- $16.32, failed runs included.
- Answer time
- 43 s median, 82 s at the 90th percentile.
- Strongest and weakest
- Appointment scheduling (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.
International (Singapore) deployment, one tier up to 1M input tokens. Cache: implicit and explicit caching are discounted (explicit cache hits 10% of input, creation 125%), no single cached price recorded. Context taken from the top pricing tier (1M). Listed as a commercial model; Alibaba lists a separate open-source qwen3.8-2.4t-a95b.
Qwen3.8 Max 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 DeepSeek V4 Pro
- Two Chinese frontier APIs that buyers weigh against each other, both far cheaper than the US flagships.
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 27BAlibaba (Qwen) · open weights | $0.50 | $3.00 | 1M | $2.70 |
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.
Run Qwen3.8 Max for a quarter of its list price
AIGROW API credit covers Qwen3.8 Max and is metered at the list price above: $25 buys $100 of usage.
Prices checked 22 September 2026