Q 
Qwen
Alibaba's open-weight model family, from tiny to frontier-scale.
NOT REALLY
why this verdict
Keep it — OpenAI has not replaced it
OpenAI's version overlaps, but does not finish the AI assistants job, so this one is still worth keeping open.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Closed frontier models still lead on the hardest benchmarks. OpenAI, January 1, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 3 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Llama, DeepSeek and Mistral.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
Reason composed from the fields above missing: announcement linked recorded: free replacement listed recorded: two or more escape hatches
- Threatened by
- OpenAI
- Since
- January 1, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
Qwen ships an enormous range of open weights — text, vision, coding, embedding — which made it the default base model for fine-tuners worldwide. Its effect on this list is indirect but large: any SaaS whose margin came from reselling API calls is competing with a free download.
Escape hatches
L 
Llama Meta's open models.
llama.com open_in_new D 
DeepSeek Strong reasoning, open weights.
deepseek.com open_in_new M 
Mistral European open models.
mistral.ai open_in_new3 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.