Released August 26, 2026. The open-weight release is Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a preview of the Qwen4 architecture: 125B mixture-of-experts with 6B active per token, a 51B n-gram embedding table and a 4B multi-token prediction layer. Qwen 3.8 Flash is the production API version on Qwen Cloud at $0.16/$0.47.
SWE-bench Pro 62.5 — competitive with models several times its price
Only 6B active parameters per token from a 125B mixture-of-experts, so throughput is high and hosting is cheap
991K context window at $0.16/$0.47
Weaknesses
No published SWE-bench Verified score, only SWE-bench Pro
An architecture preview rather than a settled flagship — Qwen 3.8 Max remains Alibaba's top-end model
Real-world use cases
What people actually use Qwen 3.8 Flash for.
Volume coding work where SWE-bench Pro 62.5 is enough and cost per token dominates
Near-1M-context document processing at budget-tier rates
Self-hosted inference on modest hardware thanks to 6B active parameters per token
How Qwen 3.8 Flash compares
The nearest models people weigh against it, and what actually separates them.
vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash — Against DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (DeepSeek), Qwen 3.8 Flash runs about 59% cheaper per token, gives up 1.1x on context and answers faster. Take Qwen 3.8 Flash unless you specifically need what DeepSeek V4.1 Flash does better.
vs DeepSeek V4-Pro — Against DeepSeek V4-Pro (DeepSeek), Qwen 3.8 Flash runs about 52% cheaper per token, gives up 1x on context and answers faster. Take Qwen 3.8 Flash unless you specifically need what DeepSeek V4-Pro does better.
vs DeepSeek V4-Flash — Against DeepSeek V4-Flash (DeepSeek), Qwen 3.8 Flash costs about 32% more per token, gives up 1x on context and answers faster. DeepSeek V4-Flash is the one to check first if the price difference matters more than the ceiling.
Price History
Qwen 3.8 Flash pricing over time
↓6% since Sep 1
43 data points · tracked daily since Sep 1, 2026
Ready to try it?
Start using Qwen 3.8 Flash
Cheap high-throughput coding and reasoning. Start free — no card required.
DeepSeek's September 10, 2026 release, now its top API model: a natively multimodal, MIT-licensed model with 1M context that DeepSeek says beats its own V4-Pro on coding and agent work — V4-Pro traffic has been routed to it since September 14.
Verdict
DeepSeek's open, cheap new default — V4-Pro now routes to it.
Quality score
84%
Pricing
$0.30/1M in
$1.20/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
1.0M tokens
Released September 10, 2026; previous V4 Flash and V4 Flash Vision endpoints taken offline the same day. From September 14, 2026, requests to deepseek-v4-pro are served by V4.1 Flash at Flash rates until a V4.1-Pro ships. Gateway id deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash; gateway price $0.30/$1.20 per 1M (varies by host; DeepSeek's own API uses peak and off-peak rates). 1,048,576 context, 32,768 max output on the gateway. Weights on Hugging Face, MIT licence. Verified October 10, 2026.
DeepSeek's 1.6T-parameter (49B active) MoE flagship with hybrid sparse attention — near-frontier coding and reasoning at roughly a tenth of closed-rival pricing, MIT-licensed open weights.
Verdict
Former DeepSeek flagship — API requests now run on V4.1 Flash.
Quality score
82%
Pricing
$0.43/1M in
$0.87/1M out
Speed
Balanced
3/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Open-weight preview April 24; GA ~July 20, 2026. Off-peak pricing verified on api-docs.deepseek.com; Beijing-business-hours surge doubles it. Legacy deepseek-chat/reasoner endpoints retired July 24, 2026. Since September 14, 2026, DeepSeek routes deepseek-v4-pro API requests to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, billed at Flash rates, until a V4.1-Pro ships.
A 284B-parameter (13B active) MoE workhorse re-post-trained for agentic and coding tasks — beats the V4-Pro preview on every published agent benchmark at ultra-commodity pricing.
Verdict
Retired September 10, 2026 — replaced by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash.
Quality score
76%
Pricing
$0.14/1M in
$0.28/1M out
Speed
Fast
4/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Official V4-Flash-0731 release July 31, 2026; weights on Hugging Face, API in public beta. Only DeepSeek model supporting the Responses API. DeepSeek has warned of a future price increase.
Qwen 3.8 Flash costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.47 per million output tokens on the API, with cached input at $0.016 per million. A month of 10M input and 2M output tokens runs about $2.44 at list price, before any batch or caching discounts.
What is the context window of Qwen 3.8 Flash?
Qwen 3.8 Flash has a 991k tokens context window, with up to 128k tokens of output per response. That is the total of prompt plus response the model can hold in one request.
What is Qwen 3.8 Flash best for?
Qwen 3.8 Flash is best for cheap high-throughput coding and reasoning. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and very fast speed.
When should I avoid Qwen 3.8 Flash?
You need Alibaba's maximum capability — that is Qwen 3.8 Max — or a SWE-bench Verified number.
What is a cheaper alternative to Qwen 3.8 Flash?
DeepSeek V4-Flash (DeepSeek) at $0.14/1M/1M input against Qwen 3.8 Flash's $0.15/1M/1M — roughly 32% less per token all in. Retired September 10, 2026 — replaced by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Compare it first if Qwen 3.8 Flash's pricing is the thing stopping you.
What is a faster alternative to Qwen 3.8 Flash?
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash — fast against Qwen 3.8 Flash's very fast, with 1.0M tokens of context. Worth the swap when response time is what your users notice rather than the last few points of reasoning depth.
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