What is Qwen3-VL-8B good for?

Image and video tasks on small hardware, from edge to cloud. A dense 8.8B model under Apache 2.0, on a single consumer GPU.

When is Qwen3-VL-8B not a good fit?

Audio input, image output or built-in web search. The 30B-A3B and 235B-A22B siblings are the larger sizes in the same series.

What is the cheapest way to run Qwen3-VL-8B?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. EcoHash charges $0.15 in / $0.50 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 1x RTX 4070 at $72 a month, which costs the same as about 346M tokens a month on that API.

Can I self-host Qwen3-VL-8B?

Yes. The weights are Apache 2.0 licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 9 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $72 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

Open weights · Apache 2.0

Qwen3-VL-8B

A dense 8B Qwen3 vision-language model above the 4B and 2B sizes, suited to edge-to-cloud multimodal deployment.

Jump to: Specs Pricing Self-hosting Similar models FAQ More from Alibaba Cloud

Visit website Compare vs other LLMs →

Cheapest via EcoHash

Input: $0.15 /1M tokens
Output: $0.50 /1M tokens

2 providers

Key Specifications

Context window: 262K tokens
Max output: 66K tokens
Parameters: 8.8B
Inputs: Text, image, video

Capabilities Show details: Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems. Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON.

Hosted API pricing

Input tokens M Output tokens M

Provider	Input /1M tokens	Output /1M tokens	Cached input /1M	Cost at 10M in + 2M out
EcoHash	$0.15	$0.50	$0.08	$2.50	View
Alibaba Cloud Creator	Open weights, no hosted price				View

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-8B needs about 9 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 1× RTX 4070 at about $72 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 346M tokens a month on EcoHash's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Fits on 1 Single node ≤ 8

Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 262K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bitINT4 / FP4	9 GB26 GB	1× RTX 4070	$72$158	346M tokens /mo760M tokens /mo
8-bitFP8 / INT8	13 GB30 GB	1× RTX 4060 Ti	$79$288	380M tokens /mo1B tokens /mo
16-bitFP16 / BF16	24 GB58 GB	2× RTX 4060 Ti	$158$346	760M tokens /mo2B 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. How we estimate costs.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest Qwen3-VL-8B by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs Qwen3-VL-8B
Llama 3.3 70B Meta	$0.175	$0.13	$0.40	128K	Dec 2023	−16%
Qwen3.5-27B Alibaba Cloud	$0.19	$0.09	$0.69	262K		−9%
Hy3 Tencent	$0.1967	$0.13	$0.53	262K		−6%
Ministral 3 14B Mistral	$0.20	$0.20	$0.20	256K		−4%
Qwen3.8-Flash Alibaba Cloud	$0.2033	$0.15	$0.47	1M		−2%
Qwen3-VL-8B This model Alibaba Cloud	$0.2083	$0.15	$0.50	262K
Qwen-MT-Turbo Alibaba Cloud	$0.215	$0.16	$0.49	16K		+3%
Command R 08-2024 Cohere	$0.225	$0.15	$0.60	128K	Jun 2024	+8%
GPT-4o Mini OpenAI	$0.225	$0.15	$0.60	128K	Oct 2023	+8%
MiniMax-M2.7 MiniMax	$0.225	$0.15	$0.60	205K		+8%
Mistral Small 4 Mistral	$0.225	$0.15	$0.60	256K		+8%

Prices are 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.

Runpod

Spin Up a GPU in Seconds - No Setup Required

Deploy AI Models Globally in 30+ Regions

Scale from 0 to 1000 GPUs on Demand

PyTorch, Tensorflow & Docker Ready

Learn more

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Qwen3-VL-8B good for?: Image and video tasks on small hardware, from edge to cloud. A dense 8.8B model under Apache 2.0, on a single consumer GPU.
When is Qwen3-VL-8B not a good fit?: Audio input, image output or built-in web search. The 30B-A3B and 235B-A22B siblings are the larger sizes in the same series.
What is the cheapest way to run Qwen3-VL-8B?: Hosted, unless you push serious volume. EcoHash charges $0.15 in / $0.50 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 1x RTX 4070 at $72 a month, which costs the same as about 346M tokens a month on that API.
Can I self-host Qwen3-VL-8B?: Yes. The weights are Apache 2.0 licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 9 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $72 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

More from Alibaba Cloud

Model	Context	Input /1M	Output /1M
Qwen3.8-Flash	1M	$0.15	$0.47
Qwen-MT-Turbo	16K	$0.16	$0.49
Qwen3.8-27B Open weights	262K	$0.17	$0.50
Qwen3.5-27B Open weights	262K	$0.09	$0.69
Qwen3-Coder-Next Open weights	262K	$0.08	$0.98
Qwen3-235B-A22B Instruct (2507) Open weights	262K	$0.09	$0.58
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B Open weights	262K	$0.12	$0.92
Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B Instruct Open weights	262K	$0.20	$0.70