Qwen3 8B API Pricing
Alibaba · Budget · Qwen · released 2025-04. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
Qwen3 8B has held the same list price since 2026-08-15 and is the 63rd cheapest of 142 Budget models. Only one host, Alibaba, sells it, so there is no second price to shop. No Arena score is published for it, so it carries no Efficiency score and cannot hold the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $0.12 per 1M tokens
- Output: $0.46 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: not published
- Context window: 131K
Qwen3 8B market position
On blended price ($0.354 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 56% of Budget models: 63rd cheapest of 142. Across every category it is cheaper than 78% of priced text models in the catalogue: 63rd cheapest of 281.
Qwen3 8B licence, size and capabilities
Qwen3 8B 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 8B parameters. Listed capabilities: Text, Reasoning, Agents. Filling its 131K context window once costs $0.02 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 | $40 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $60 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $172 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $111 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $126 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $45 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $55 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $207 |
Qwen3 8B 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 1 host. 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.
Alibaba is the only host with a published rate, $0.12 input / $0.46 output per 1M tokens, which is the price shown on this page.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| Alibaba (the price shown above) | $0.12 | $0.46 |
Qwen3 8B price history
Qwen3 8B has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.12 input / $0.46 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
Alternatives to Qwen3 8B
- Next cheaper Budget model: Gemma 3 27B (Google) at $0.339 blended, 4% less.
- Next more expensive: DeepSeek V3.2 Exp (DeepSeek) at $0.368 blended, 4% more.
Common questions about Qwen3 8B pricing
- How much does Qwen3 8B cost?
- Qwen3 8B costs $0.12 per million input tokens and $0.46 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does Qwen3 8B offer batch or cached pricing?
- No batch or cache pricing is published for this model.
- What would Qwen3 8B cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, Qwen3 8B costs about $40 at list prices.
- Has the price of Qwen3 8B changed?
- Qwen3 8B has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.12 input / $0.46 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
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 8B 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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