Qwen 2.5 72B: token counter & pricing
Alibaba · approximate, within ±3% of reference · pricing as of 2026-04-26.
- Provider
- Alibaba
- API model ID
qwen2.5-72b-instruct- Context window
- 131,072 tokens
- Input price
- $0.90 per 1M tokens
- Output price
- $0.90 per 1M tokens
- Tokenizer accuracy
- approximate, within ±3% of reference
- Pricing as of
- 2026-04-26
Open the counter to count tokens for Qwen 2.5 72B in real time.
What is Qwen 2.5 72B?
Qwen 2.5 72B is Alibaba's flagship general-purpose open-weights model — 72 billion parameters, 131k context, strong on multilingual tasks (especially Chinese, Korean, Japanese), competitive with Llama 70B on most English benchmarks.
How tokens are counted here
Qwen uses a BPE tokenizer designed to be efficient across English and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). We approximate in your browser, accurate to ~±3% for English. CJK accuracy is similar but less thoroughly validated. Marked ≈±3%.
When to use Qwen 2.5 72B
- Multilingual workloads, especially CJK. Qwen tokenizer compresses Chinese and Japanese substantially better than GPT or Llama tokenizers — meaningful cost savings on CJK-heavy text.
- Open-weights with permissive licensing. Apache-2.0 (with some restrictions for the largest variants).
- Wide hosting availability. Together.ai, Hyperbolic, and several others.
- Self-hosting on a single 8×A100 or H100 node.
When not to use it:
- Pure English workloads where Llama 70B has wider tooling support and similar quality.
- Western-language commercial workloads where Claude / GPT / Gemini have better-tested production behaviors.
Pricing notes
At ~$0.90 per million (single rate, indicative via Together.ai), Qwen 72B sits in the open-source large-model price band alongside Llama 70B (~$0.59-$0.79). Choose by language, license, and hosting fit rather than by raw price.
For coding specifically, the related Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B is often a better fit at lower cost — see its dedicated page.
Common questions
Does Qwen 72B handle English as well as Llama 70B?
Comparable on most English benchmarks. Llama 70B has more deployment maturity and larger English-only training data; Qwen has better multilingual coverage.
What's the difference between Qwen 2.5 72B and Qwen 2.5 Coder?
72B is general-purpose. Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B is specifically tuned for code generation and editing — substantially better on coding benchmarks at smaller size and lower cost. Use Coder for code tasks.
Is the Apache 2.0 license really unrestricted?
For most commercial use, yes. Alibaba's Qwen license has a usage cap exception: organizations with over 100 million monthly active users need a separate commercial license. Below that, Apache 2.0 applies.
Compare Qwen 2.5 72B to other models
- Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B (Alibaba, $0.80/$0.80)
- Claude Haiku 4.5 (Anthropic, $0.80/$4.00)
- Llama 3.1 70B (Meta, $0.59/$0.79)
- Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google, $1.25/$10.00)