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Alibaba (Qwen) · language model

Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct: pricing, context and benchmarks

Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct is Alibaba (Qwen)'s model released on November 11, 2024. It costs $0.66 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens, with a 32.8K-token context window. No independent score has been published for it so far.

Mid-range costOpen weightsNo tool calling

What you need to know about Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct

Alibaba (Qwen), based in China, put Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct online on November 11, 2024. It accepts text as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 32,768 tokens, larger than 8 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 29,491 tokens in one go.

Released more than 1 year ago, it belongs to a generation most vendors have since superseded.

Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct pricing

On OpenRouter, Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct costs $0.66 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.745 per million, more expensive than 49 % of paid models (1 times cheaper than the median of $0.76).

A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.0018. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $55 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Scores published by Epoch AI on the benchmarks the site tracks:

Source: Epoch AI, Benchmarking Hub (CC BY 4.0).
BenchmarkWhat it measuresScoreDate
Aider Polyglotcoding exercises in several languages16.4 %Nov 21, 2024

Features, privacy and local use

  • It does not support tool calling: it is not suited to driving an AI agent that has to act.
  • It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
  • Its knowledge stops at June 2024.

Its weights are open and downloadable from Hugging Face (apache-2.0 licence): you can run it on your own machines without sending your data to a third party. With 32,763,876,352 billion parameters, it needs about 18,308,242,607 GB of memory at 4-bit quantisation. Check with the VRAM calculator. It was downloaded 555,819 times on Hugging Face last month.

Other Alibaba (Qwen) models

Average price per million tokens (3 input for 1 output).
ModelReleasedAvg. priceECI
Qwen3.8 Max PrimeSep 23, 2026$6—
Qwen3.8 Omni FlashSep 21, 2026$0.23—
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)Sep 3, 2026$3155.1
Qwen3.8 FlashAug 26, 2026$0.23—
Qwen3.8 27BAug 14, 2026$0.78151.7
Qwen3.8 2.4T A95BAug 12, 2026$3—
Qwen3.7 FlashJul 27, 2026$0.06144.1
Qwen3.7 PlusJun 3, 2026$0.56147

Verdict

Computed score: 38/100, from public data (performance, price, context, features).

Strengths

  • Open weights: self-hostable, your data stays with you.

Limitations

  • No tool calling: unusable as an agent's brain.
  • No independent score published: performance cannot be verified.
  • Older generation, often replaced by a newer model from the same vendor.
  • Text only: reads neither images nor files.

Avoid if…

  • you are building an agent that must call tools;
  • you analyse long documents in one go;
  • you want to host it on a single consumer computer (≈ 18,308,242,607 GB needed at 4-bit).

Frequently asked questions

How much does Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct cost?

$0.66 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens on OpenRouter (checked October 25, 2026). A task with 2,000 tokens read and 500 written costs $0.0018.

How big is Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct's context window?

32,768 tokens, roughly 25,000 words, with a maximum of 29,491 output tokens.

Can Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct run locally?

Yes, its weights are published under the apache-2.0 licence. Expect about 18,308,242,607 GB of memory at 4-bit.

Is Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct suitable for an AI agent?

No: without tool calling it cannot act, only answer.

What are the alternatives to Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct?

The closest models on price and performance are GPT-3.5 Turbo, Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), and Skyfall 36B V2.

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Neutrality. No affiliate links. No vendor pays to be reviewed, rated or ranked. Reviews are directed by François Chollet, neutral and factual, and every data point is dated and sourced. How we score