Alibaba Cloud Bailian 阿里云百炼 (Model Studio)

What people say

Bailian is the console half of Alibaba's model stack - DashScope is the API you actually code against, Bailian is where API keys, fine-tuning jobs, RAG pipelines, prompt templates and billing live. On May 20, 2026, Alibaba reframed the whole thing as an 'AI Model Supermarket,' opening the platform to outside labs; Zhipu AI was the first non-Alibaba model added. Two weeks later, on June 2, the Qwen team shipped Qwen3.7-Plus, a multimodal agent model with vision, GUI operation and tool invocation folded into one endpoint.

Independent hands-on testing describes the developer flow favorably: getting an API key took seconds, the visual workflow builder simplified assembling an app, and a test call to Qwen-Max returned an accurate, properly token-metered response without friction. New accounts get 1 million free tokens per model for 90 days, and Alibaba runs an 'AI General Savings Plan' offering up to 5.3x discounts for committed monthly spend. The Bailian Coding Plan - 8 bundled models including Qwen3-Coder-Plus and Qwen3-Coder-Flash for ¥7.9/month, roughly a dollar - is aggressively priced next to Western coding-assistant subscriptions.

The pricing structure has real sharp edges once you're past the free tier. Entry-level Qwen-Turbo starts cheap at ¥0.30 per million input tokens, but tiered pricing means the per-token rate depends on how much you send in a single request, and one write-up flagged that Qwen3-Coder-Plus output pricing jumps about 12.5x when input exceeds 256K tokens - a detail that isn't surfaced clearly in the console. Everything bills in RMB only; there's no native USD pricing view, which complicates cost forecasting for teams outside China. Support and console UI are still primarily Chinese-language-first, though the DashScope SDKs (Python, Java, Node.js, all Apache 2.0) are documented in English.

Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.