Qwen3 8B pricing and routing profile
Qwen3 8B from Qwen (Alibaba) lists at $0.117 per million input tokens and $0.455 per million output tokens, with a 131,072-token context window. Prices from OpenRouter's catalogue on 2026-09-28.
Tool callingReasoning control
Cost per 1,000 requests
| Request shape | List cost |
|---|---|
| Classification or routing (600 tokens in, 10 out) | $0.0747 |
| Chat reply (2,000 in, 400 out) | $0.416 |
| Retrieval-augmented answer (8,000 in, 500 out) | $1.16 |
Before prompt caching. Try your own shape in the cost calculator.
Can Gimbix route to it first?
Not as a first-answer model through OpenRouter: no host returns token log probabilities for Qwen3 8B. It can still be the model Gimbix falls back to when a cheaper model is unsure.
Cheaper models that can answer first
Models priced below Qwen3 8B that expose a confidence signal. Whether they answer your traffic as well is what a Gimbix pilot measures.
| Model | Input / output per 1M | Cheaper on a chat reply |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 VL 32B Instruct | $0.104 / $0.416 | 10% |
| Nemotron 3 Super | $0.08 / $0.45 | 18% |
| Gemma 3 27B | $0.08 / $0.45 | 18% |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | $0.10 / $0.32 | 21% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | $0.10 / $0.30 | 23% |
| Gemma 4 31B | $0.09 / $0.34 | 24% |
Questions
How much does Qwen3 8B cost?
Qwen3 8B lists at $0.117 per million input tokens and $0.455 per million output tokens on OpenRouter as of 2026-09-28. A typical chat reply of 2,000 input and 400 output tokens costs about $0.416 per 1,000 requests.
What is the context window of Qwen3 8B?
131,072 tokens.
Can a cheaper model replace Qwen3 8B?
Sometimes. Gimbix proves it on your own traffic before routing: the cheaper model must match Qwen3 8B on one half of your requests and make at most three answers worse on the other.