Free Qwen Is Dead: Alibaba Shuts Down Qwen Code Free Tier

1 month ago 15

In brief

Alibaba unopen down the escaped tier of Qwen Code.
Users are directed to cheque third-party providers similar OpenRouter.
Recently, Minimax besides changed its licence from unfastened root to unfastened weights, with conditions for commercialized use.

Alibaba's Qwen Code killed its escaped tier today. The connection successful the GitHub repo doesn't mince words: "Qwen OAuth escaped tier has been discontinued."

Alibaba besides reduced the 1,000 escaped requests quota to 100 per day. Users wanting to tally Qwen codification connected the unreality are present directed to cheque Alibaba Cloud Coding Plan, OpenRouter, Fireworks AI, oregon bring their ain API key.

Qwen Code wasn't a hobby project. It was Alibaba's terminal coding agent—a nonstop Claude Code rival moving Qwen3-Coder models, with multi-file repository enactment and SWE-Bench (a benchmark that measures however bully a exemplary is astatine coding) scores competitory with the champion paid tools connected the market.

If you're conscionable uncovering retired now, you missed the GitHub changelog. The Coding Plan Pro subscription runs $50 a month.

This landed 48 hours aft chap Chinese AI institution MiniMax pulled astir the aforesaid move. The Chinese laboratory dropped M2.7—a 230 billion-parameter exemplary that astir matches Claude Opus 4.6 connected coding benchmarks—then instantly rewrote the license to necessitate written authorization for commercialized use.

Did you know?

Parameters are what find an AI's capableness to learn, reason, and store information. The much parameters, the wider the model's breadth of knowledge.

The exemplary launched nether what MiniMax called "MIT-style" terms. MIT licenses don't restrict commercialized use. The developer assemblage connected Hacker News and Hugging Face noticed wrong hours.

MiniMax said it was protecting against bad-faith hosting providers who were shipping degraded versions nether its name. "They locomotion distant reasoning MiniMax is mid," the company's Head of Developer Relations posted. The commercialized regularisation stayed anyway.

Neither determination is accidental. The Financial Times reported that Alibaba's ain Qwen squad has been moving toward proprietary improvement aft cardinal enactment departures. Xiaomi, different Chinese company, shipped MiMo v2 past period nether a closed-source license.

Chinese open-source models went from 1.2% of planetary open-model usage successful precocious 2024 to astir 30% by extremity of 2025. Qwen overtook Meta's Llama arsenic the astir deployed self-hosted exemplary connected the planet.

That adoption wasn't built connected benchmarks. It was built connected escaped services.

With U.S. spot export controls tightening and the Beijing-Washington AI contention grinding on, "free" is harder to support erstwhile investors privation returns and the U.S. authorities is watching each deployment decision.

Those wanting to play with Alibaba’s models locally, and free, are inactive capable to bash so. Their models stay open source, but the much almighty ones necessitate beauteous dense hardware to run.