Alibaba ends free tier for Qwen Code, cuts usage quota
Alibaba’s Qwen Code has discontinued its free tier. The message in the GitHub repository is explicit: “Qwen OAuth free tier has been discontinued.”
At the same time, Alibaba has reduced the free request quota from 1,000 to 100 requests per day, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
Users who want to run Qwen Code in the cloud are now being directed to alternatives such as Alibaba Cloud Coding Plan, OpenRouter, Fireworks AI, or to bring their own API key.
Qwen Code was not a hobby project. It served as Alibaba’s terminal-based coding agent—a direct competitor to Claude Code—powered by Qwen3-Coder models. It included support for multi-file repository workflows and achieved competitive SWE-Bench scores, a benchmark used to measure how well models perform on coding tasks, comparable to some of the strongest paid tools on the market.
This landed 48 hours after fellow Chinese AI company MiniMax pulled almost the same move. The Chinese lab dropped M2.7—a 230 billion-parameter model that nearly matches Claude Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks—then immediately rewrote the license to require written authorization for commercial use.
News.Az
By Nijat Babayev
