Flagship Qwen model for complex reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows
Qwen3.6 Max Preview by alibaba is offered by 14 providers on this page. Its official list price is $1.30 per 1M input tokens and $7.80 per 1M output tokens. The lowest paid channel is Kilo Gateway at $1.03 / $6.16 per 1M, about 2.1× below the list price. That channel is a third-party gateway, so confirm its availability and rate limits before depending on it.
Artificial Analysis rates it 28.4 on the Intelligence Index. Against its lowest blended price of $2.31 per 1M, that is roughly 12 index points per dollar, which is the value ratio the leaderboards rank on. Median output speed is 72 tokens per second, with 2.96s to the first token.
The context window is 262,144 tokens at the reference host, but hosts report different limits, from 240,000 to 262,144, so the usable window depends on the provider you pick. It supports reasoning, tool use, and structured output. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kilo Gateway | Gateway | $1.03 | $6.16 | — | $1.28 | 262,144 | 65,536 | |
| OpenRouter | Gateway | $1.03 tiered >128K: $1.58 | $6.16 | — | $1.28 | 262,144 | 65,536 | |
| NanoGPT | Gateway | $1.04 | $6.24 | $0.52 | — | 245,760 ⚠ | 65,536 | |
| Pioneer | Gateway | $1.04 | $6.24 | $0.21 | $1.30 | 240,000 ⚠ | 64,000 | |
| AIHubMix | Gateway | $1.27 tiered >128K: $2.11 | $7.61 | $0.13 | $1.59 | 240,000 ⚠ | 64,000 | |
| AlibabaOfficial | First-party | $1.30 | $7.80 | $0.13 | $1.63 | 262,144 | 65,536 | |
| Vercel AI Gateway alibaba/qwen-3.6-max-preview | Cloud | $1.30 tiered >128K: $2.00 | $7.80 | $0.13 | $1.63 | 240,000 ⚠ | 64,000 | |
| DevPass (LLM Gateway) | Gateway | $1.30 | $7.80 | $0.13 | $1.63 | 262,144 | 65,536 | |
| LLM Gateway | Gateway | $1.30 | $7.80 | $0.13 | — | 262,144 | 65,536 | |
| EmpirioLabs AI qwen3-6-max-preview | Gateway | $1.31 tiered >128K: $1.97 | $7.88 | $1.31 | — | 256,000 ⚠ | 65,536 | |
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.
Interleaved thinking (reasoning between tool calls) is declared by 2 of 14 providers.
3 / 14 providers expose no reasoning control (reasoning_options: []).
Individual evaluations run by Artificial Analysis, on the same reasoning tier as the intelligence score above. Each benchmark has its own task set and harness, so rows are not comparable with one another. The Intelligence Index above draws on a different, newer set of evaluations.