I run Qwen3.5-plus through Alibaba’s coding plan (Model Studio): incredibly cheap, pretty fast, and decent. I can’t compare it to the highest released weight one though.
Re:Can I Run AI locally?
by singpolyma3 on Friday March 13, 2026 @06:10PM
(#47370655)
Is that https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/coding-pla... ? I was a bit confused that it seems to be sized in requests not tokens
Yeah that's the one. I've not managed to get close to the limits that the cheapest plan has. Though I did get to sign up at $3 a month which has been neat, too, seems that's gone now
Re:Can I Run AI locally?
by constantinum on Friday March 13, 2026 @08:59PM
(#47372143)
I also want to try Qwen 3.5 plus. I have a doubt, I see almost same pricing for both Qwen and Claude code(the difference being the highest pro plan looks cheaper), and not for the lower plans. Am I missing something, when you say “cheaper” ??
I'm using their $3 USD (currently, it will go up in price later I believe - edit: just checked and yeah, so the $10 one) lite plan, and I'm yet to get close to hitting the request limits when I swap to it once I'm out of Claude tokens.
An OpenRunPod with decent usage might encourage more non-leading labs to dump foundation models into the commons. We just need infra to run it. Distilling them down to desktop is a fool's errand. They're meant to run on DC compute.
I'm fine with running everything in the cloud as long as we own the software infra and the weights.
This is conceivably the only way we could catch up to Claude Code is to have the Chinese start releasing their best coding models and for them to get significant traction with companies calling out to hosted versions. Otherwise, we're going to be stuck in a take off scenario with no bridge.