# Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct API

> Qwen3-VL 8B Instruct is the 8-billion-parameter dense, non-thinking edition of Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3-VL vision-language family. Alibaba notes it needs less GPU memory while keeping the series' upgraded image and video understanding, long-document and long-video handling, spatial awareness, object recognition, multilingual OCR and GUI agent abilities. Pick it for lighter multimodal deployments; the 30B A3B and 235B A22B models trade size for more capability.

Source: https://www.sandbase.ai/model/alibaba/qwen3-vl-8b-instruct
API reference: https://www.sandbase.ai/model/alibaba/qwen3-vl-8b-instruct/docs

## Facts

- Provider: Alibaba
- Type: Language model
- Model ID: `alibaba/qwen3-vl-8b-instruct`
- Price: $0.18 per 1M input tokens, $0.70 per 1M output tokens
- Context window: 131.1K tokens, up to 32.8K output tokens
- Capabilities: chat, vision, structured output, function calling
- Billing: pay per use from one SandBase balance; no provider account or subscription needed

## Call it

- Chat Completions API: `POST https://api.sandbase.ai/v1/chat/completions`

```bash
curl -X POST https://api.sandbase.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SANDBASE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "model": "alibaba/qwen3-vl-8b-instruct",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Hello"
    }
  ],
  "max_tokens": 2048
}'
```

## FAQ

### How do I call Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct through SandBase?

Create a SandBase API key, then send requests with the model ID "alibaba/qwen3-vl-8b-instruct" to Chat Completions API (/v1/chat/completions) at https://api.sandbase.ai. The request examples on this page show the exact payload.

### How much does Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct cost?

$0.18 per 1M input tokens and $0.70 per 1M output tokens, billed per request from your SandBase balance. Discounts, when available, are shown in the pricing on this page.

### What is the context window of Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct?

131.1K tokens of context, with up to 32.8K output tokens per response.

### How does Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct score on benchmarks?

Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct scores 7.3 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (v4.3), ranking #82 of 83 models on SandBase. Source: Artificial Analysis, measured as Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct.

### Which features does Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct support?

Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct supports vision (image input), function calling, structured output. See Specifications above for the full list.

### Do I need a separate Alibaba account?

No. One SandBase API key and balance gives you access to Alibaba Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct and the other models in the catalog; you do not need to sign up with Alibaba separately.