Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Plus supports text, video and imagery inputs at low cost of $0.4/$1.6 per 1M token — but it's proprietary

Alibaba this week released Qwen3.7-Plus, the latest AI large language model (LLM) in its globally beloved and increasingly expansive Qwen family, boasting more multimodal capabilities and a 60% lower cost than the prior, text-only Qwen3.7-Max model released just weeks ago. However, like its immediate predecessor Qwen3.7-Plus is available only under a "closed" commercial license via proprietary application programming interfaces (API) and Qwen Chat. That marks a big departure from the Qwen strategy to date, which was focused mainly on releasing powerful,near state-of-the-art open source models. Those enterprises and users who relied on the open source Qwen models — among them, U.S. giants such as Airbnb — will no doubt be disappointed to see that Alibaba is going closed for its newer releases.Still, the model is worth a look because of its low cost and high performance on multimodal tasks like creating enterprise-grade visuals or analyzing video, imagery and screenshots, which Qwen3.7-Max cannot do (it's text-only). It is among the cheaper powerful AI models available now, coming in price-wise just above Chinese rival's new MiniMax-M3's limited-time discount pricing. VentureBeat Frontier AI Model API Pricing SnapshotModelInputOutputTotal CostSourceMiMo-V2.5 Flash$0.10$0.30$0.40Xiaomi MiModeepseek-v4-flash$0.14$0.28$0.42DeepSeekdeepseek-v4-pro$0.435$0.87$1.305DeepSeekMiniMax-M3$0.30$1.20$1.50MiniMaxQwen3.7-Plus$0.40$1.60$2.00Alibaba CloudGemini 3.1 Flash-Lite$0.25$1.50$1.75GoogleMiMo-V2.5$0.40$2.00$2.40Xiaomi MiMoGrok 4.3 low context$1.25$2.50$3.75xAIGLM-5$1.00$3.20$4.20Z.aiKimi-K2.6$0.95$4.00$4.95Moonshot/KimiGLM-5.1$1.40$4.40$5.80Z.aiGrok 4.3 high context$2.50$5.00$7.50xAIQwen3.7-Max$2.50$7.50$10.00Alibaba CloudGemini 3.5 Flash$1.50$9.00$10.50GoogleGemini 3.1 Pro Preview ≤200K$2.00$12.00$14.00GoogleGPT-5.4$2.50$15.00$17.50OpenAIGemini 3.1 Pro Preview >200K$4.00$18.00$22.00GoogleClaude Opus 4.8$5.00$25.00$30.00AnthropicGPT-5.5$5.00$30.00$35.00OpenAIMai