Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking

Reasoning variant of Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B with chain-of-thought for complex visual reasoning, on the same compact MoE with 3B active.

Params: 31.1B, 3B active
Context: 262K tokens
Max output: 66K
License: Apache 2.0

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Hosted API price

List price via Alibaba Cloud · per 1M tokens

USD

Input: $0.20 /1M
Output: $2.40 /1M
Hosted by: 1 provider

Hosted API pricing

How we price

Order

Providers are listed cheapest input rate first, then by output rate, a tie going to the creator's own listing. A provider that lists the model without a published rate sits at the end.

Prices

Base-tier, on-demand rates in USD per 1M tokens, converted at ECB reference rates where a provider publishes in another currency. Cached-input and batch rates show only where a provider publishes them. "Cheapest" marks the one provider with the lowest input and output pair; a tie wears no badge.

Cost

Input rate times the input tokens plus output rate times the output tokens, at the monthly volume set above the table. Cached-input, batch, long-context and reasoning-token billing are not modelled.

Transparency and funding

Affiliates: Affiliate links are marked. We may earn a commission if you click them, but commissions never affect the order.

Every provider serving Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking, cheapest input first. Set your monthly volume to see what each would bill.

Input M Output M

Every provider serving Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking, with its price per 1M input and output tokens and what the volume above would cost
Provider	Input /1M	Output /1M	Cost at 10M in + 2M out	Link
Alibaba Cloud Creator	$0.20	$2.40	$6.80	Visit website

Heads up: Base-tier, on-demand rates per 1M tokens; cached, batch and long-context tiers excluded. A provider may serve a shorter context or a quantized build than the creator's release. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Estimated cost to self-host

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking needs about 21 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 2× RTX 4060 Ti at about $187 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 330M tokens a month on Alibaba Cloud's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Single node ≤ 8

What it costs to self-host Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking at each precision: the memory it needs, the cheapest rental that holds it, that rental's month and the API volume it pays off at
Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 262K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bit INT4 / FP4	21 GB32 GB	2× RTX 4060 Ti	$187$374	330M tokens /mo661M tokens /mo
8-bit FP8 / INT8	36 GB46 GB	4× RTX 3060	$230$374	407M tokens /mo661M tokens /mo
16-bit FP16 / BF16	67 GB90 GB	8× RTX 3060	$461$749	813M tokens /mo1B tokens /mo

Estimates based on median on-demand rates for Nvidia GPUs. Memory is weights plus KV cache for one request, using FP8 KV cache where supported and FP16/BF16 otherwise. Break-even assumes a 5:1 input-to-output ratio. No guarantee of runtime support, usable performance, or that a matching quantized build exists. Pricing methodology.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Models priced nearest Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking per 1M tokens, each at its cheapest provider
Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking
Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B Instruct Alibaba Cloud	$0.50	$0.30	$1.50	262K		−12%
MiMo-V2.6-Pro Xiaomi MiMo	$0.5075	$0.435	$0.87	1M		−10%
DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek	$0.5233	$0.45	$0.89	1M		−8%
GPT-5 Mini OpenAI	$0.5417	$0.25	$2.00	400K	May 2024	−4%
DeepSeek V3 Turbo DeepSeek	$0.55	$0.40	$1.30	64K		−3%
Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking This model Alibaba Cloud	$0.5667	$0.20	$2.40	262K
Qwen3-235B-A22B Thinking (2507) Alibaba Cloud	$0.575	$0.23	$2.30	262K		+1%
Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B Alibaba Cloud	$0.575	$0.38	$1.55	262K		+1%
GPT-4.1 Mini OpenAI	$0.60	$0.40	$1.60	1M	Jun 2024	+6%
Gemini 2.5 Flash Google Cloud	$0.6667	$0.30	$2.50	1M	Jan 2025	+18%
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite Google Cloud	$0.6667	$0.30	$2.50	1M	Mar 2026	+18%

USD per 1M tokens at each model's cheapest listed provider. Blended is the cost of 10M input plus 2M output tokens, spread over the 12M.

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Capabilities

What Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking accepts and can do, as published by Alibaba Cloud.

Text Accepts and generates natural-language text.
Image Accepts images as input alongside text.
Video Accepts video as input.
Reasoning Thinks before it answers, always on or as a switchable mode.
Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems.
Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON.

Common questions

What is Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking good for?

Multi-step visual reasoning over images and video, the chain-of-thought variant of Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B. Apache 2.0 weights, on a single consumer GPU.

When is Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking not a good fit?

Audio input, image generation or built-in web search. Short captioning or extraction that does not need reasoning tokens is covered by the Instruct variant.

What is the cheapest way to run Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Alibaba Cloud charges $0.20 in / $2.40 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 2x RTX 4060 Ti at $187 a month, which costs the same as about 330M tokens a month on that API.

Can I self-host Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Thinking?

Yes. The weights are Apache 2.0 licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 21 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $187 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.