Qwen Plus 0728 API Pricing
Alibaba (Qwen) · context window 1M · prices updated 2026-09-20
Where Qwen Plus 0728 sits on price
At $0.78 per million output tokens, Qwen Plus 0728 is a mid tier model — 2.6× cheaper than the median output price of $2.00, which puts it cheaper than 73% and pricier than 27% of the models we track. It sits 18th cheapest of the 53 Alibaba (Qwen) models we track. Output is only 3.0× the input price, an unusually flat spread: long prompts hurt about as much as long answers, so prompt size is where the savings are.
What real workloads cost on Qwen Plus 0728
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a mid-priced model — a $0.78/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win. | $0.0024 | $35.88 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0012 | $351 |
| Long-context analysis — 200 runs/day (250K in / 4K out) Only possible on large-context models; input cost is nearly the whole bill. | $0.0681 | $409 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Qwen Plus 0728 with caching and batch options.
Qwen Plus 0728 price history
Qwen Plus 0728's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 49 days of stability in a market where 79 of the 335 models we track have repriced over the same period, including 17 of Alibaba (Qwen)'s own 53 models.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
Qwen Plus 0728 vs R1 Distill Llama 70B
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is R1 Distill Llama 70B (DeepSeek) — 3% more expensive on output, with $0.54 more per million input tokens. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See R1 Distill Llama 70B pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Alibaba (Qwen) models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Qwen Plus 0728 API cost?
Qwen Plus 0728 costs $0.26 per million input tokens and $0.78 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 1,282,051 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the support chatbot workload cost on Qwen Plus 0728?
Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) costs about $0.0024 per request and $35.88 per month on Qwen Plus 0728. Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win.
› What does it cost to fill Qwen Plus 0728's 1M context window?
Sending 1M of input in a single request costs $0.26 at $0.26 per million tokens — before any output. There is no cached-input tier on this model, so every repeat of that context is billed at full price. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Qwen Plus 0728 worth the price?
Qwen Plus 0728 sits in the middle of the market (18 of 53 by price within Alibaba (Qwen)). The honest test is a routing experiment: send the same 200 real requests to this model and to a tier below, and compare failure rate against the price gap — most teams find a majority of traffic never needed the pricier model.