Qwen3-Coder-Next review 2026: 80B params, 3B active, and the cheapest credible coding agent API

Alibaba’s Qwen3-Coder-Next is a low-cost open-weight coding model launched in February 2026, built on a hybrid MoE design with 80B total parameters and 3B active.

It supports a 256K context window, is released under Apache 2.0, and is priced at just $0.11 per million input tokens, making it attractive for budget coding-agent workflows.

The model scored 70.6% on SWE-bench Verified and is still solid for routine fixes, refactors, and agentic coding tasks.

However, newer models like Claude Sonnet 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, Kimi K2.5, and MiniMax M2.5 have overtaken it on harder benchmarks, pushing Qwen3-Coder-Next down to seventh among open models by May 2026.