Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B: pricing, context and benchmarks

What you need to know about Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B

Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B was released by Alibaba (Qwen) (China) on July 23, 2025. It accepts text 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 15 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B pricing

On OpenRouter, Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B costs $0.3 per million input tokens and $1 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.475 per million, more expensive than 40 % of paid models (1.6 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 $0.0011. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $33 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.1 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Qwen3 Coder 480B A35B. 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).
• Its knowledge stops at June 2025.

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 480,154,875,392 billion parameters, it needs about 268,307,444,859 GB of memory at 4-bit quantisation. Check with the VRAM calculator. It was downloaded 55,681 times on Hugging Face last month.

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