Qwen 3.6 Has Four Tiers. Here's How to Route Without Burning Cash. (opens in new tab)

Alibaba shipped four Qwen 3.6 SKUs in 30 days. The pricing spread between cheapest and most expensive output is 41x — open-source 35B-A3B at $0.90/M out vs Max-Preview at $6.24/M out. Pick the wrong tier and you either burn money or leave benchmark headroom you didn't need. This is the developer-side companion to TokenMix.ai's tier picker analysis. Code patterns for routing across all four variants, fallback chains for the "Preview" tag risk, and a self-host break-even discussion for the Apac...