As of August 25, 2026, Qwen3-Coder is 28% cheaper per million tokens than Step-3.5-Flash. Qwen3-Coder is $0.18 / $0.18 per million input/output tokens versus Step-3.5-Flash at $0.10 / $0.40. Sources: https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/ and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing
Sources: Qwen pricing (https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/); AnotherWrapper LLM pricing (https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing)
Qwen3-Coder
Qwen
Input
$0.18
Output
$0.18
Step-3.5-Flash
StepFun
Input
$0.10
Output
$0.40
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Qwen3-CoderStep-3.5-FlashVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. Qwen3-Coder has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless Step-3.5-Flash's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 25, 2026, Qwen3-Coder is 28% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Qwen3-Coder costs $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.18 per million output tokens ($0.36 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Step-3.5-Flash costs $0.10 / $0.40 per million tokens ($0.50 blended). Sources: https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/ and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Qwen3-Coder Qwen API pricing is $0.18 input and $0.18 output per million tokens via Qwen. Step-3.5-Flash StepFun API pricing is $0.10 input and $0.40 output per million tokens via StepFun. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Step-3.5-Flash has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 74.4%. Qwen3-Coder does not have that eval on this page yet.
Qwen3-Coder supports a 256K token context window, while Step-3.5-Flash supports 66K tokens. Qwen3-Coder offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Shared benchmark scores for Qwen3-Coder and Step-3.5-Flash are still limited. Check the comparison table for the evals each model has published. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Qwen3-Coder and Step-3.5-Flash are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Qwen3-Coder has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Qwen3-Coder through Qwen and Step-3.5-Flash through StepFun with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published Qwen API pricing and StepFun API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/ and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Qwen3-Coder supports up to 256K output tokens per request, while Step-3.5-Flash supports up to 8K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Step-3.5-Flash has a measured throughput of approximately 150 tokens/second. Throughput data for Qwen3-Coder is not yet available. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Qwen3-Coder or Step-3.5-Flash from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Qwen3-Coder costs $0.18/M input and $0.18/M output. Step-3.5-Flash costs $0.10/M input and $0.40/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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