Alibaba Group Holding is testing whether businesses and consumers will pay for its artificial intelligence office assistant, with the Qwen app now offering three membership tiers with annual plans ranging from 200 yuan (US$29.60) to 1,499 yuan for its flagship version, according to its listing on Apple’s App Store. Users can also buy extra video generation credits priced between 26 yuan and 968 yuan, depending on usage limits. The Qwen chatbot remains free to use. Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Running large language models and multi-modal agents at scale requires vast computing resources, making monetisation critical to offsetting rising infrastructure costs as the technology matures. Alibaba is actively expanding Qwen beyond a stand-alone chatbot into a broader AI agent ecosystem.