---
title: "Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/models/qwen__qwen3.8-max/
description: "Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max: $2.00/M in, $6.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper."
---

# Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai

> Qwen: Qwen3.8 Max: $2.00/M in, $6.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper.

[Leaderboard](/) / Qwen

# Qwen3.8 Max

Qwen · released 2026-08-03 · proprietary

 $3.00 per million tokens, balanced Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic

## GLM 5.3 scores higher and costs less — but you would give something up.

**+1.4** on the capability index and **28% cheaper** ($2.15/M against $3.00/M). What you lose:

 - no image, video input

Capability scores do not measure context length, output ceiling or which inputs a model accepts, so a higher score does not mean a drop-in replacement.

## Our take

 editorial — not a measurement

Alibaba's flagship at $2/$6 with LMArena 1481, a 1M window and full multimodal input including video. Priced identically to the open-weight Qwen3.8 2.4T A95B but proprietary, and the only one of the pair with a published cache-write rate. The Qwen line's real advantage is breadth: the family spans a 2.4T-parameter MoE down to 9B models, mostly Apache-licensed, so you can prototype on the hosted flagship and then drop to self-hosted weights in the same family without changing prompt style.

### Strengths

 - LMArena 1481 at $2/$6
- 1M context, 131k max output
- Multimodal including video input
- Family continuity from flagship down to small open-weight models

### Weaknesses

 - Proprietary, unlike most of the Qwen family
- Output at $6 is above Grok 4.6 for a lower Arena score
- No AA intelligence index captured

### Reach for it when

 - Multimodal work with a self-hosted migration path
- Teams already using Qwen open weights

### Avoid it if

 - You want open weights — use Qwen3.8 2.4T A95B instead
- Grok 4.6 already covers your need at similar cost

Sources: openrouter.ai · arena.ai

### Every price dimension

| Input | $2.00 /M |
| --- | --- |
| Output | $6.00 /M |
| Cached input | $0.250 /M |
| Cache write | $2.50 /M |

### Independent scores

| Intelligence | 58.1 |
| --- | --- |
| Coding | 71.8 |
| Agentic | 58.4 |

Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.

#### Best rankings by task

 - webapps #1 of 56 1340
- uicomponent #3 of 140 1362
- 3d #3 of 136 1376
- mobileapps #3 of 56 1265
- fullstack #4 of 59 1339
- gamedev #7 of 144 1340
- codecategories #8 of 145 1323
- website #13 of 151 1304

### Capability

| Context window | 1M |
| --- | --- |
| Max output | 131K |
| Input modes | text, image, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | always on |
| Open weights | no |

### Provenance

| Price source | openrouter.ai |
| --- | --- |
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |

Qwen3.8 Max is the flagship model in Alibaba's Qwen3.8 series, the general-availability successor to the Qwen3.8 Max Preview. It is a multimodal reasoning model intended for complex reasoning, visual understanding,...