Qwen Image Max or Ideogram 4.5: 100 images, price and limits

On Sume, 100 Qwen Image Max images cost $9.375. The same 100 on Ideogram 4.5 cost $3.75 at low quality, $7.50 at medium and $27.50 at high. Qwen Image Max is text-to-image only; Ideogram 4.5 also edits a source image with up to four more references. Medium Ideogram is both cheaper and more flexible than Qwen Max on paper, so the case for Qwen Max rests on how its pictures look in your tests, not on this table.

Sume's figures are list times 1.25 from the repo's price tables. fal lists Qwen Image Max at $0.075 per image, and Ideogram 4.5 at $0.03, $0.06 and $0.22 by quality with the note that image size does not change the price (both pages read 2026-10-08).

The rows

Both rows are in the contract; counts are from the catalog code.

What fal says about each

The Qwen Image Max page says the model improves on the Qwen Image Plus series by enhancing the realism and naturalness of images. It makes no claim about text. Ideogram's page ties the price tiers to quality and states that dimensions do not change them. Neither page gives a benchmark you can lean on, so settle the choice with your own prompts.

A fair test

Write the ten prompts you actually use, run each on both rows, and count the results you would publish. Divide the sum of usage.cost by that count. If Ideogram medium wins on keepers per dollar, you also keep the edit path. If Qwen Max wins on looks, the extra price is the cost of that look, and you should know it before a large batch.

A request for resolution or quality on a row that does not list it fails with 400 unsupported_parameter, so keep per-model request builders instead of one shared body.

Ideogram 4.5's quality tiers make the comparison more than one number. Low is $3.75 per hundred, below Qwen Image Max's $9.375, and high is $27.50, three times above it. If your tests show Qwen Max beating Ideogram medium but not Ideogram high, the price comparison is $9.375 against $27.50, not $9.375 against $7.50, and that changes the decision.