Is Qwen3 Max a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen3 Max on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, Qwen3 Max is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Gemini 3.8 Flash scores 81.6 higher and costs 4% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
Gemini 3.8 Flash is both better and cheaper than Qwen3 Max: 81.6 points higher on LMArena and 4% less per million tokens, $0.06 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1413.1
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$1.56/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1494.7
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$1.50/M
Qwen3 Max takes text, returns up to 65,536 tokens from a 262,144-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 22 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3 Max scores 1413.1 at $1.56 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | 1494.7 +81.6 | $1.50/M | 4% |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | 1490.5 +77.4 | $1.50/M | 4% |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | 1476.1 +63.0 | $1.50/M | 4% |
| GLM 5.3 | 1475.1 +62.0 | $1.29/M | 17% |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 +58.8 | $0.237/M | 85% |
| GLM 5.2 | 1466.9 +53.8 | $0.998/M | 36% |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 +51.7 | $0.544/M | 65% |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | 1454.2 +41.1 | $0.560/M | 64% |
| Kimi K2.5 | 1445.6 +32.5 | $0.900/M | 42% |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 | 1444.0 +30.9 | $1.18/M | 24% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +27.5 | $0.144/M | 91% |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 1439.3 +26.2 | $1.06/M | 32% |
| Qwen3.5 397B A17B | 1438.3 +25.2 | $1.29/M | 17% |
| Qwen3.6 Plus | 1436.7 +23.6 | $0.731/M | 53% |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | 1435.5 +22.4 | $0.850/M | 46% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +21.4 | $0.143/M | 91% |
| MiniMax M3 | 1433.5 +20.4 | $0.525/M | 66% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +18.7 | $0.103/M | 93% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +16.8 | $0.450/M | 71% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +14.3 | $0.175/M | 89% |
| Qwen3.5-122B-A10B | 1417.9 +4.8 | $0.715/M | 54% |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | 1415.3 +2.2 | $0.563/M | 64% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.1 | 1462.4 | $1.48/M | context |
| GLM 5 | 1446.3 | $0.930/M | context |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 | $0.153/M | max output |
| GLM 4.6 | 1440.5 | $0.760/M | context, max output |
| GLM 4.7 | 1435.9 | $0.738/M | context |
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