Qwen3 8B API Pricing
Alibaba (Qwen) · context window 131K · prices updated 2026-09-15
Where Qwen3 8B sits on price
At $0.455 per million output tokens, Qwen3 8B is a budget tier model — 4.6× cheaper than the median output price of $2.08, which puts it cheaper than 80% and pricier than 20% of the models we track. It sits 14th cheapest of the 53 Alibaba (Qwen) models we track. Output costs 3.9× input, the usual spread — trim both, starting with the answer length.
What real workloads cost on Qwen3 8B
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.455/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill. | $0.0001 | $335 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0.0001 | $3.80 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0006 | $174 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Qwen3 8B with caching and batch options.
Qwen3 8B price history
Qwen3 8B's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 44 days of stability in a market where 78 of the 334 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).
Qwen3 8B vs Gemma 3 27B
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Gemma 3 27B (Google) — priced within a rounding error on output, with $0.037 less 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 Gemma 3 27B pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Alibaba (Qwen) models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Qwen3 8B API cost?
Qwen3 8B costs $0.117 per million input tokens and $0.455 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 2,197,802 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on Qwen3 8B?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0.0001 per request and $335 per month on Qwen3 8B. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill Qwen3 8B's 131K context window?
Sending 131K of input in a single request costs $0.0153 at $0.117 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 Qwen3 8B worth the price?
Qwen3 8B is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 80% of the models we track. At this price the question is not cost but capability: it is a good fit for classification, extraction, routing and bulk summarisation, and a poor fit for multi-step reasoning where a wrong answer costs more than the tokens saved.