Qwen3.5 4B is a compact open-weight multimodal model from Alibaba for reasoning, coding, visual understanding, tool use, and structured output.
Qwen3.5 4B by alibaba is offered by 4 providers on this page. Public prices are shown for 2 of them. Its reference price is $0.10 per 1M input tokens and $0.20 per 1M output tokens. The lowest paid channel is EmpirioLabs AI at $0.04 / $0.07 per 1M, about 2.5× below the reference price. That channel is a third-party gateway, so confirm its availability and rate limits before depending on it. It also has 2 free ($0) channels; free tiers usually carry rate limits, and subscription-covered access bills $0 per token only after the subscription fee.
Artificial Analysis rates it 20.4 on the Intelligence Index, with 22.6 for coding. Against its lowest blended price of $0.048 per 1M, that is roughly 429 index points per dollar, which is the value ratio the leaderboards rank on. Median output speed is 27 tokens per second, with 0.75s to the first token.
The context window is 262,144 tokens at the reference host, but hosts report different limits, from 32,768 to 262,144, so the usable window depends on the provider you pick. It supports reasoning, tool use, and structured output. Accepted input modalities are Text, Image, and Video. The weights are open, so it can also be self-hosted or served through a gateway of your choice. Providers report the capability flags inconsistently, so verify a specific feature against the host you plan to use. Its training knowledge cuts off at 2025-04.
Quality is independently evaluated by Artificial Analysis. Speed/latency are model-level medians.
| Provider | Tier | Input | Output | Cache read | Cache write | Context | Output limit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| QVAC | Gateway | Free | — | — | 32,768 ⚠ | 8,192 | ||
| SiliconFlow (China) Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B | Cloud | Free | — | — | 262,144 | 65,536 | ||
| EmpirioLabs AI qwen3-5-4b | Gateway | $0.04 | $0.07 | $0.02 | — | 262,144 | 32,768 | |
| NanoGPT | Gateway | $0.10 | $0.20 | $0.05 | — | 262,144 | 32,768 |
Sorted by blended price (input×0.75 + output×0.25) asc. The official channel always shows regardless of rank. Whether a gateway's low price is actually usable can't be verified.
2 more channels offer $0 (QVAC, SiliconFlow (China)); free tiers usually have rate limits and no SLA, excluded from ranking.
1 / 4 providers expose no reasoning control (reasoning_options: []).