Qwen3.8 27B API Pricing
Alibaba · Mid-tier · Qwen · released 2026-08. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
The price we publish for Qwen3.8 27B has changed 7 times since 2026-08-15, most recently on 2026-09-22 when the reference host changed (+23.0%); it is now the 33rd cheapest of 108 Mid-tier models. Buying from DeepInfra rather than at the rate quoted here lowers the token price by about 39%. It is rated a stable release but does not meet all four criteria of the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $0.42 per 1M tokens
- Output: $3.00 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: $0.09
- Context window: 1M
- Arena ELO: 1438 (as of 2026-09-25)
Qwen3.8 27B market position
On blended price ($2.23 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 70% of Mid-tier models: 33rd cheapest of 108. Across every category it is cheaper than 38% of priced text models in the catalogue: 175th cheapest of 281. Its Arena ELO of 1438 ranks 36th of the 68 models that carry one, tied with one other, above 46% of them.
Qwen3.8 27B licence, size and capabilities
Qwen3.8 27B is open weights, which is not the same as open source: the weights are published, but under Qwen, a licence that restricts some uses. Read it before self-hosting commercially. Its published size is 27B parameters. Listed capabilities: Text, Vision, Reasoning, Code, Agents. Filling its 1M context window once costs $0.42 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $183 – $213 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $277 – $324 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $747 – $780 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $628 – $645 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $676 – $726 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $228 – $243 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $287 – $294 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $1.0K – $1.2K |
Qwen3.8 27B pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 16 different hosts. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-09-28 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown. These hosts do not all serve the model at the same numeric precision, so the cheapest is not a like-for-like substitute for the dearest.
Cheapest host: DeepInfra at $0.15 input / $1.88 output per 1M tokens, 39% below the price we publish on a blended basis (30% input, 70% output). The dearest, Reka, charges 2.3x the cheapest.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| DeepInfra — bf16 | $0.15 | $1.88 |
| Phala | $0.20 | $2.08 |
| Darkbloom — fp4 | $0.05 | $2.20 |
| Parasail — fp8 | $0.24 | $2.20 |
| Chutes — fp8 | $0.24 | $2.20 |
| AkashML — fp8 | $0.25 | $2.20 |
| DekaLLM | $0.08 | $2.50 |
| Mancer 2 — fp8 | $0.20 | $2.50 |
| Ionstream — fp8 | $0.09 | $2.55 |
| Alibaba | $0.42 | $2.55 |
| CoreWeave — fp8 | $0.40 | $3.00 |
| Novita (the price shown above) | $0.42 | $3.00 |
| Cloudflare | $0.45 | $3.20 |
| Venice — fp8 | $0.45 | $3.20 |
| Wafer | $0.08 | $4.40 |
| Reka | $0.08 | $4.40 |
Qwen3.8 27B price history
Qwen3.8 27B has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.45 input / $3.20 output per 1M tokens. The price we publish has changed 7 times since then, 5 of them a change of reference host rather than a repricing. The latest change, on 2026-09-22, was +23.0% on the blended price (30% input, 70% output), to $0.42 input / $3.00 output (reference host changed, not a repricing). Net of all changes, the blended price is -6.3% against 2026-08-15.
| Date | Old price (in / out) | New price (in / out) | Blended change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-22 | $0.20 / $2.50 | $0.42 / $3.00 | +23.0% (reference host changed, not a repricing) |
| 2026-09-21 | $0.42 / $3.00 | $0.20 / $2.50 | -18.7% (reference host changed, not a repricing) |
| 2026-09-20 | $0.21 / $2.55 | $0.42 / $3.00 | +20.4% (reference host changed, not a repricing) |
| 2026-09-13 | $0.42 / $3.00 | $0.21 / $2.55 | -16.9% (reference host changed, not a repricing) |
| 2026-09-04 | $0.42 / $2.55 | $0.42 / $3.00 | +16.4% (reference host changed, not a repricing) |
2 earlier changes are not listed.
Alternatives to Qwen3.8 27B
- Next cheaper Mid-tier model: Grok 4.20 (xAI) at $2.13 blended, 5% less.
- Next more expensive: Seed-2.0-Code (ByteDance) at $2.25 blended, 1% more.
The nearest Mid-tier models on Arena ELO, each with its blended price and score difference against Qwen3.8 27B.
- GPT-5.1 (OpenAI) — $1.25 in / $10.00 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1438: 231% more expensive, same Arena ELO
- GPT-5.2 (OpenAI) — $1.75 in / $14.00 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1436: 364% more expensive, 2 ELO points lower
- GPT-5 (OpenAI) — $1.25 in / $10.00 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1435: 231% more expensive, 3 ELO points lower
- Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Alibaba) — $0.55 in / $3.50 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1442: 17% more expensive, 4 ELO points higher
- Cheapest within 15 Arena points: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 (DeepSeek), 93% cheaper, 2 ELO points lower, out of 11 models in that band.
- Highest Arena ELO within 20% of this price: Grok 4.20 (xAI), 5% cheaper, 37 ELO points higher, out of 9 models in that price band.
Common questions about Qwen3.8 27B pricing
- How much does Qwen3.8 27B cost?
- Qwen3.8 27B costs $0.42 per million input tokens and $3.00 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does Qwen3.8 27B offer batch or cached pricing?
- Prompt-cache reads cost $0.09/M input tokens. No batch pricing is published.
- What would Qwen3.8 27B cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, Qwen3.8 27B costs about $213 at list prices.
- Has the price of Qwen3.8 27B changed?
- Qwen3.8 27B has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.45 input / $3.20 output per 1M tokens. The price we publish has changed 7 times since then, 5 of them a change of reference host rather than a repricing. The latest change, on 2026-09-22, was +23.0% on the blended price (30% input, 70% output), to $0.42 input / $3.00 output (reference host changed, not a repricing). Net of all changes, the blended price is -6.3% against 2026-08-15.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for Qwen3.8 27B in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
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