qwen-plus

By price, qwen-plus ranks 20th cheapest of 68 on input and 17th on output. Its quality score of 84 ranks 41st of 68, and on value (quality score ÷ output price) it ranks 17th of 68. Its blended rate sits 86% below the catalog average.

In real billing terms: a support chatbot handling 50,000 turns a month (2,000 input / 500 output tokens each) costs about $46 per month on qwen-plus, while a RAG workload of 20,000 queries (8,000 input / 800 output tokens each) runs about $54. Because output is priced 3.0× input here, long-generation tasks scale cost fastest — cap output length before you optimise anything else.

A 131K context window holds roughly 175 pages of A4 text (at ~750 tokens per page), ranking 46th of 68 here. That covers typical RAG and multi-turn chat, though book-length inputs still need retrieval and chunking. Output runs at about 110 tok/s (25th fastest of 68), acceptable interactively, though long responses will feel slow.

We track 6 Alibaba models, and qwen-plus's blended rate sits 49% below that provider's average. If your task tolerates a little less headroom, qwen3.5-flash (Alibaba) blends about 86% cheaper at a quality score of 82, and is worth benchmarking first. Going the other way, Hunyuan HY3 scores 87 on quality for about 74% less.

The closest model in Alibaba's line-up is qwen3.5 ($0.10 input / $0.15 output, quality 91). Against it, qwen-plus scores 7 points lower on quality, runs 25 tok/s faster (about 29%), has a 869K smaller context window, costs 71% more blended. When two models sit this close on price, the deciding factor is usually the quality ceiling — run both against your real prompts before picking.