Qwen

What is Qwen?

Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's family of large language and multimodal models, offered through a free consumer chat app, open-weight downloads and a paid developer API. The Qwen3 series is released under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face.

Key capabilities of Qwen

• Qwen Chat: free chat app at chat.qwen.ai
• Qwen3 open-weight models: sizes from 0.6B to 235B-A22B under Apache 2.0
• Coder models: such as Qwen3 Coder Plus
• Vision-language models: such as Qwen3-VL Plus
• Developer API: through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, formerly DashScope
• Self-hosting: download weights and run on your own hardware

How Qwen works

Consumers chat in the app or on the web at no charge. Developers call models through the Model Studio API, billed per token, or download open weights from Hugging Face and run them locally. Third-party gateways also resell access.

Who uses Qwen?

Everyday users, developers and enterprises wanting multilingual, coding and vision models with an open-weight option.

Qwen pricing

The Qwen Chat app is free. API use is billed per token through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, and third-party reports cite roughly 1 million free tokens per model for new accounts for 90 days. Check current rates with the vendor.

Qwen alternatives

ChatGLM, ERNIE Bot and Tencent Hunyuan are other Chinese model families, while Notion AI and ChatGPT are assistant products. Qwen is notable for open-weight releases.