DashScope Qwen API Pricing 2026: Free Tokens, Limits, Setup
Qwen is Alibaba's LLM series. The latest Qwen3.6-Plus (released April 2, 2026) is the new king of Chinese coding models, with coding ability near Claude Sonnet 4.6, 1M token context, native multimodal (OCR, object detection). Qwen3.6-27B (released April 22, 2026) is a 27B dense open-source model that beats 397B models at coding, with 262K native context (extendable to 1M), first-ever Thinking Preservation feature, only ~17GB for local deployment. Web version is free and unlimited. API via Alibaba Cloud Bailian with 70M free tokens for new users.
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Qwen (Alibaba) free tier, pricing, API limits, and alternatives
Quick answer: Qwen API gives new Alibaba Cloud Bailian/DashScope users 70M signup tokens, but the real click decision is pricing and limits: verify RPM, TPM, expiration, model availability, and Qwen3.6 token pricing before building.
🎁 Free Tier
Daily Limit: 70M signup tokens via Bailian; runtime/RPM/TPM limits vary by model
| Model | Context | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6-Plus | 1000k | Quota and RPM/TPM vary by account | Latest flagship, strong long-context/coding model; verify free-credit coverage, RPM, TPM, and availability in the DashScope console |
| Qwen3.6-27B | 262k (1M extended) | Local/open-source or hosted quota | 27B dense open model for local deployment; hosted API quota and free-credit coverage depend on the account tier |
| Qwen-Max | 32k | Higher-cost paid model; quota varies | Alibaba general model; confirm free-credit coverage and output pricing before heavy use |
| Qwen-VL | 32k | Multimodal quota varies | Multimodal model; image/OCR usage may consume different quota than text calls |
🔑 Free API
Free Credits: 7000 万 tokens（新用户一次性；DashScope/Bailian 控制台为准）
Rate Limit: 按模型和账号层级不同（RPM/TPM/并发以控制台为准）
Free credits via Alibaba Cloud Bailian/DashScope. Qwen3.6-Plus priced at ¥2/M input tokens for ≤32K context in our tracker; longer context and output tokens may be priced differently. OpenRouter has free Preview (50/day default, 1000/day with $10+ credits). Bailian Coding Plan Lite discontinued; qwen3.6-plus is Pro plan exclusive.