Qwen3.8 27B is a fast, low-cost model from Qwen, available here under the exact model id “qwen3.8-27b:free”. It is the entry point of the Qwen line-up here, below Qwen3.8 Max and Qwen3.8 27B Groq. Qwen has not published a release date we can cite; it has been available here since 19 Oct 2026.
Qwen documents tools, vision and json mode for it, and it reads images as well as text.
It is free to use while the promotion runs: requests bill at $0. Models on the free lane (ids ending in :free) carry no rate of their own and share one allowance: 100 requests and 5,000,000 tokens a day for every account, in Chat and through the API. No balance and no card are needed: the $10 sign-up credit pays for priced models first, and once it is gone the models that bill $0 keep their daily requests. A paid subscription, a coupon or the owner raising your account is the only way past the daily number. After that it returns to the regular rate of $0.00 input and $0.00 output per million tokens.
It is served through the OpenAI-compatible format at https://api.oneaiapikey.com/v1, so any SDK or tool that lets you set a custom base URL, for example Codex CLI, Cursor and Cline, can use it. It is not offered on the Anthropic Messages endpoint; pick an Anthropic-format model for Claude Code.