Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen3 Max
List-price comparison · Claude Sonnet 4.6 details · Qwen3 Max details
For a typical workload (100,000 requests / mo), Qwen3 Max costs 74% less — $249.60/mo vs $960.00/mo.
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Qwen3 Max | |
|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | $0.780 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $3.90 |
| Typical request (1,200 in + 400 out) | $0.0096 | $0.0025 |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 262,144 tokens |
| Max output | 128k tokens | 32,768 tokens |
| Tier | Balanced | Balanced |
| Provider | Anthropic | Qwen |
Projected monthly cost
Rows open both models in the calculator — adjust volume and token counts there.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Strong price-to-performance for production agents: reliable tool use, structured JSON output, and solid coding ability at roughly a fifth of Opus's cost.
Can still misstep on the hardest multi-step reasoning chains where Opus would succeed — budget for occasional escalation to a flagship model.
Qwen3 Max
Strong multilingual reasoning (especially Chinese/English) and competitive coding benchmarks at open-weight pricing.
Cache-write pricing is unusually high relative to input cost — workloads that rely heavily on prompt caching should benchmark actual savings.
More comparisons
Vendor list rates · per-request examples assume 1,200 input + 400 output tokens.