SWE-bench Pro 62.5 at sixteen cents per million input.
84
Coding
76
Writing
78
Research
45
Images
93
Value
86
Long Context
Published benchmarks
Use this when
Cheap high-throughput coding and reasoning
Skip this if
You need Alibaba's maximum capability — that is Qwen 3.8 Max — or a SWE-bench Verified number.
Pricing
$0.16/1M in
$0.47/1M out
Context
991k tokens
Speed
Very fast
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.
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
Best agentic capability per dollar in the directory.
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.
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
Best open-weights flagship — near-frontier coding at a tenth of the price.
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.
Z.ai's MIT-licensed open-weight flagship — the top open-weights coding model of mid-2026, beating GPT-5.5 on agentic coding benchmarks at roughly a sixth of the cost.
Verdict
Top open-weights coder — beats GPT-5.5 at a sixth of the cost.
Quality score
80%
Pricing
$1.40/1M in
$4.40/1M out
Speed
Balanced
3/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Announced June 13, 2026; pay-per-token API live June 16. Two reasoning modes ('thinking' and 'max thinking'). GLM Coding Plan: Lite $18/mo (~$12.60 effective yearly), Pro $72, Max $160.
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?
Mistral: Mistral Nemo is the lower-cost option to compare first when you want a similar workflow fit with less token spend.
What is a faster alternative to Qwen 3.8 Flash?
DeepSeek V4-Flash is the better pick when response time matters more than maximum depth or premium quality.
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