| Qwen3.8 Max | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price in/out ($/M) | $2 / $6 | $0.4 / $1.6 |
These are not the same kind of product. Qwen 3 ships open weights under a permissive licence, so you can self-host it, fine-tune it on your own data and keep it on-premise. Qwen3.8 Max is API-only. What Max buys is a 1M context window against 256K, video input on top of text and vision, and a stronger multimodal flagship, at $2 / $6 per M tokens against $0.4 / $1.6, roughly five times the input price. If open weights or on-premise deployment is why you chose Qwen, Qwen 3 is still the only one of the two that does it. Treat Max as a sibling, not a successor.