Counting tokens for Qwen models
Alibaba publishes Qwen's tokenizer, so the counts on this page are exact. Qwen3.8 27B and Qwen3.8 Max load by default. Add a Qwen3.6 or Qwen3.5 model from the compare table to price the same text on the earlier generations. The token count will not move, because every generation ships the same vocabulary. Qwen3.8 27B shows as free: the weights are open, so you can run it on your own hardware.
Pricing and context windows
Qwen input prices per million tokens, with the vocabulary and context window of each model.
| Model | Tokenizer | Price / 1M input | Context window |
|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | qwen-3.8 | Free | 262K |
| Qwen3.8 Max | qwen-3.8 | $2.00 | 1M |
| Qwen3.6 27B | qwen-3.6 | $0.60 | 262K |
| Qwen3.6 Max | qwen-3.6 | $1.03 | 262K |
| Qwen3.5 9B | qwen-3.5 | $0.10 | 262K |
| Qwen3.5 397B | qwen-3.5 | $0.50 | 262K |
Prices and context windows are curated metadata refreshed periodically from the providers and OpenRouter, so treat them as guidance rather than a quote. Token counts are always produced by the real tokenizer.
How Qwen tokenization works
Qwen3.5, 3.6, and 3.8 share one vocabulary, so a version-specific count is not a thing. All three generations ship the same byte-level BPE vocabulary of about 248,000 entries. Qwen3.8 adds a handful of special tokens for its audio features, but those never appear in ordinary text. That means "Qwen3.8 token counter" and "Qwen3.6 token counter" are the same measurement, and only price and context window separate the models.
The vocabulary was built with a large share of Chinese text, so Chinese and mixed Chinese-English content tokenizes more compactly here than under English-first encodings.
Frequently asked questions
Do Qwen3.5, 3.6, and 3.8 use the same tokenizer?
Yes. The three generations ship the same vocabulary file. Any text produces the same token count on all of them, so one Qwen counter covers every version. Qwen3.8 adds a few special tokens for audio input that never occur in pasted text. What changes between models is the price per million tokens and, on some models, the context window.
Is this Qwen's official tokenizer?
Yes. The tool loads the vocabulary published with the models. The file is fetched once and the text is tokenized in your browser, so the count is exact rather than an approximation and nothing is uploaded.
How does Qwen tokenize Chinese?
Efficiently: common Chinese sequences have their own entries. A Chinese passage typically costs noticeably fewer tokens with Qwen's vocabulary than with an OpenAI encoding. Paste a sample and add a GPT model in the compare table to see the gap on your own text.
Which Qwen models does this cover?
Qwen3.8 27B and Max, Qwen3.6 27B and Max, plus Qwen3.5 9B and 397B. Because the vocabulary is shared, the counts also apply to other models in those generations. Sizes not listed here still tokenize identically; only the price you pay for them differs.
