As of August 20, 2026, Phi 4 Mini is 43% cheaper per million tokens than QwQ-32B-Preview. Phi 4 Mini is $0.08 / $0.35 per million input/output tokens versus QwQ-32B-Preview at $0.15 / $0.60. Sources: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/
Sources: OpenRouter pricing (https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models); Qwen pricing (https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/)
Phi 4 Mini
Microsoft
Input
$0.08
Output
$0.35
QwQ-32B-Preview
Qwen
Input
$0.15
Output
$0.60
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Phi 4 MiniQwQ-32B-PreviewVerdict
Phi 4 Mini offers significantly lower pricing, while QwQ-32B-Preview leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 20, 2026, Phi 4 Mini is 43% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Phi 4 Mini costs $0.08 per million input tokens and $0.35 per million output tokens ($0.43 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). QwQ-32B-Preview costs $0.15 / $0.60 per million tokens ($0.75 blended). Sources: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Phi 4 Mini OpenRouter API pricing is $0.08 input and $0.35 output per million tokens via OpenRouter. QwQ-32B-Preview Qwen API pricing is $0.15 input and $0.60 output per million tokens via Qwen. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
QwQ-32B-Preview has a published LiveCodeBench score of 50%. Phi 4 Mini does not have that eval on this page yet.
Phi 4 Mini supports a 131K token context window, while QwQ-32B-Preview supports 33K tokens. Phi 4 Mini 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.
QwQ-32B-Preview leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks versus Phi 4 Mini's 0 wins. 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 Phi 4 Mini and QwQ-32B-Preview are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Phi 4 Mini 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 Phi 4 Mini through OpenRouter and QwQ-32B-Preview through Qwen 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 OpenRouter API pricing and Qwen API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models and https://bailian.console.aliyun.com/. 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.
Phi 4 Mini supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens per request, while QwQ-32B-Preview supports up to 33K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
QwQ-32B-Preview has a measured throughput of approximately 76.04 tokens/second. Throughput data for Phi 4 Mini 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 Phi 4 Mini or QwQ-32B-Preview 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. Phi 4 Mini costs $0.08/M input and $0.35/M output via OpenRouter. QwQ-32B-Preview costs $0.15/M input and $0.60/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
The index
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