Qwen Image 2.1 Pro vs Turbo: price, steps and rate limits
Turbo is 8 steps at $0.016 per image; Pro is $0.04 with a 20 RPM cap. Both are on Alibaba Model Studio; Sume lists neither yet.
Pick Turbo for volume and drafts, and Pro when you want the higher-quality tier. Turbo costs $0.016 per image (Singapore) and runs 8 denoising steps; Pro costs $0.04 per image and is limited to 20 requests per minute, against 120 for Turbo. Neither is in the Sume image catalog today.
Side by side
The vendor pages do not publish a quality score that separates the two, so the table sticks to what Alibaba and the Qwen repo state.
| Item | Turbo | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Model id | qwen-image-2.1-turbo | qwen-image-2.1-pro |
| Price, Singapore | $0.016 | $0.04 |
| Price, other regions | $0.014133 | $0.035333 |
| Rate limit | 120 RPM | 20 RPM |
| Reference images for edits | Image input supported | Not stated on the Pro page |
| Denoising steps | 8 (open weights card) | Not stated in the docs |
What the repo says
The Qwen-Image-2.1 repository describes a unified text-to-image and editing model with a 7B visual generation component, native RGBA transparency, and editing with up to 10 reference images. The base model uses 40 steps and Turbo uses 8. The weights are under the Qwen Research License Agreement, so check the terms before commercial use of the open weights.
On Sume
Sume's catalog has qwen/qwen-image, qwen/qwen-image-max and qwen/qwen-image-layered. The Image API docs say a request only accepts parameters that the model lists, so a Turbo-specific setting would fail with 400 unsupported_parameter rather than being ignored. List the live models first and pin an id you can see.
Sources
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