Alibaba shipped four Qwen 3.6 SKUs in 30 days. The pricing spread between cheapest and most expensive output is 41x — open-source 35B-A3B at $0.90/M out vs Max-Preview at $6.24/M out. Pick the wrong tier and you either burn money or leave benchmark headroom you didn't need.
This is the developer-side companion to TokenMix.ai's tier picker analysis. Code patterns for routing across all four variants, fallback chains for the "Preview" tag risk, and a self-host break-even discussion for the Apache-2.0 35B-A3B. All pricing verified 2026-05-25 against OpenRouter and Hugging Face source pages.
Table of Contents
What Shipped (Confirmed)
Pricing Across All Four Tiers
