Qwen
Verified Oct 15, 2026 ActiveAlibaba's free web and mobile AI chat assistant, with a separate metered API for developers.
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- 100% Free
The consumer chat app and mobile apps are free with no usage cap; the developer API is billed per token through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio and has no flat monthly plan.
Use tool ↗About Qwen
Qwen is Alibaba's AI chat assistant, available free at its own web app and mobile apps with no usage cap on the consumer side. It answers questions, writes and edits text, reads uploaded files, and can generate images inside the chat, switching between Qwen model versions including an 'Auto' mode that picks a model for the request. Developers who want to call the models programmatically use Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio API instead, which is billed per token rather than through a flat plan. Qwen is one of the more widely used open-weight model families, with several sizes released for self-hosting alongside the hosted chat product.
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 15, 2026
Verified sources
- Chat interface confirms Alibaba branding and asset domains, plus a model selector including an Auto modechat.qwen.ai ↗
- Independent pricing writeup confirms the consumer chat is free with no cap and the API is billed per tokeneesel.ai ↗
Is Qwen legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Aug 27, 2023 (3 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar CSC Corporate Domains, Inc., looked up Sep 18, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by GlobalSign nv-sa, valid until Mar 31, 2027Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 15, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2023The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Alibaba Cloud, ChinaOur research, card verified Sep 1, 2026
Pros & cons of Qwen
Qwen is a solid free daily-driver chatbot backed by a large, frequently updated model family, and the same models are available to self-host since several sizes ship open-weight. The chat product's polish trails ChatGPT or Gemini in the English-speaking market, and account creation nudges toward a phone number or Alibaba-linked login.
Pros
- Free consumer chat and mobile apps with no visible message limit
- Open-weight model releases available for self-hosting, not just API access
- Multimodal chat handles file uploads and image generation in the same thread
- Per-token API pricing is inexpensive next to comparable Western models
Cons
- English-language polish and plugin ecosystem lag the top US chat products
- Signing up leans on a phone number or Alibaba account
Best for
- Anyone wanting a free chatbot with no message cap
- Developers who want to self-host an open-weight model instead of only calling an API
- Users comfortable with a Chinese-company-operated service
Not for
- Teams that need a US- or EU-based data processor for compliance reasons
- Users wanting the deepest third-party plugin ecosystem
Watch out: The free developer API tier that used to exist was discontinued, so production API use is billed per token from the first call.
Alternatives to Qwen
Qwen head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.