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Alibaba (Qwen) · language model

Qwen3.5-27B: pricing, context and benchmarks

Qwen3.5-27B is a language model from Alibaba (Qwen) released on February 25, 2026. It costs $0.27 per million input tokens and $2.16 per million output tokens, with a 262.1K-token context window. No independent score has been published for it so far.

Score
65/100
Price 15/30
Context 9/15
Features 15/15
Mid-range costOpen weightsReasoningTool calling

What you need to know about Qwen3.5-27B

Qwen3.5-27B was released by Alibaba (Qwen) (China) on February 25, 2026. It accepts text, images, and video as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 262,144 tokens, larger than 58 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 65,536 tokens in one go.

It has been available for about 8 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

Qwen3.5-27B pricing

On OpenRouter, Qwen3.5-27B costs $0.27 per million input tokens and $2.16 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.743 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 $0.0016. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $49 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.27 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Qwen3.5-27B. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Features, privacy and local use

  • It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
  • It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
  • It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.

Its weights are open and downloadable from Hugging Face: you can run it on your own machines without sending your data to a third party.

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

Qwen3.5-27B scores 65/100 on our grid, which only uses published figures.

Strengths

  • Open weights: self-hostable, your data stays with you.
  • Agent-ready: tool calling and structured JSON output.

Limitations

  • No independent score published: performance cannot be verified.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Qwen3.5-27B cost?

$0.27 per million input tokens and $2.16 per million output tokens on OpenRouter (checked October 25, 2026). A task with 2,000 tokens read and 500 written costs $0.0016.

How big is Qwen3.5-27B's context window?

262,144 tokens, roughly 197,000 words, with a maximum of 65,536 output tokens.

Can Qwen3.5-27B run locally?

Yes, its weights are published.

Is Qwen3.5-27B suitable for an AI agent?

Technically yes: it supports tool calling and structured outputs. Then check its cost for your volume.

What are the alternatives to Qwen3.5-27B?

The closest models on price and performance are Seed-2.0-Lite, Seed 1.6, and Mistral Large 3 2512.

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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