ERNIE API Pricing
ERNIE (Wenxin) is the large-language-model family built by Baidu, China's largest search company, and served through its Qianfan MaaS platform. The lineup runs from the ERNIE 5.x frontier tier down to the cost-efficient ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, all priced per token in Chinese yuan.
ERNIE 5.1 LAUNCHED NOV 2025
Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 flagship MoE on the Qianfan platform.
ERNIE 4.5 Turbo LAUNCHED APR 2025
Baidu's cost-efficient ERNIE 4.5 Turbo on Qianfan: CNY 0.8/M input, CNY 3.2/M output, CNY 0.2/M cache-hit input, converted at 1 CNY = $0.1475 (spot 2026-07-10).
| Model | Input /M | Output /M | Cached | Context | Max output | Vision | Tools | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ERNIE 5.1 FLAGSHIP | $0.59 | $2.65 | — | 128K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Frontier |
| ERNIE 4.5 Turbo | $0.12 | $0.47 | $0.03−75% | 128K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Active |
Pricing across the lineup.
The ERNIE story so far.
Releases and pricing from Baidu's Wenxin / ERNIE line on the Qianfan platform. Sourced from Baidu press, PRNewswire, and the Qianfan billing page - verified at publication.
ERNIE models are served through Qianfan (Baidu AI Cloud's MaaS platform), with per-token pay-as-you-go billing in Chinese yuan and OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
PRICINGBaidu publishes ERNIE per-token rates on the Qianfan billing page. ERNIE 5.x models are tiered by input length (0-32K vs 32K-128K); 4.5 Turbo is a single flat rate with a cache-hit discount.
CONSUMERBaidu's consumer assistant ERNIE Bot (Wenxiaoyan) is free to end users and is separate from the paid Qianfan API used for developer integrations.
Baidu was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and is China's dominant search engine, headquartered in Beijing and listed on NASDAQ (BIDU) and Hong Kong (9888).
Baidu was one of the first Chinese companies to ship a public large language model: ERNIE Bot launched in March 2023. The ERNIE (Wenxin) family has since grown through ERNIE 4.0, the aggressively-priced ERNIE 4.5 and reasoning model ERNIE X1 in 2025, and the current ERNIE 5.x frontier generation.
ERNIE models are served through Qianfan, Baidu AI Cloud's model-as-a-service platform, with per-token billing in Chinese yuan. Baidu prices ERNIE 5.x in context-length tiers and offers a cache-hit discount on ERNIE 4.5 Turbo.
Baidu competes primarily with other Chinese labs - DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Zhipu and Moonshot - on price and Chinese-language quality, while Western frontier labs remain largely inaccessible inside China.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek reset Chinese-market pricing and quality expectations; ERNIE responds with aggressive price cuts and tight Baidu-cloud integration.
CHINA GIANTAlibaba (Qwen)
Qwen is the broadest Chinese open-weight family with strong international deployment; ERNIE stays proprietary and search-integrated.
OPEN-WEIGHTZhipu (GLM)
GLM ships competitive open-weight coding models with free tiers; ERNIE competes on frontier quality and Baidu ecosystem rather than open weights.
FRONTIEROpenAI
OpenAI sets the global frontier but is largely unavailable inside China; ERNIE is a domestic-first alternative with local data residency.
CHINA CONSUMER LEADERByteDance (Doubao)
The Doubao model family from ByteDance — parent of TikTok and Douyin. Served through the Volcano Ark (火山方舟) platform on ByteDance's Volcano Engine cloud, Doubao powers China's most-used consumer AI app and undercuts most frontier labs on price.
WECHAT-SCALE LABTencent (Hunyuan)
The Hunyuan (混元) model family from Tencent — parent of WeChat, QQ, and the world's largest games business. Served through Tencent Cloud and the Yuanbao assistant inside WeChat, Hunyuan reaches over a billion users through China's dominant super-app.
ERNIE pricing questions.
Practical questions about Baidu ERNIE API pricing on Qianfan, with the published CNY rates kept separate from currency conversion and workload assumptions.
Q · 01 How much does the Baidu ERNIE API cost? +
ERNIE 5.1 is CNY 4/M input and CNY 18/M output (0-32K tier), which AI//COST stores as $0.59/$2.655 at 1 CNY = $0.1475. ERNIE 4.5 Turbo is CNY 0.8/3.2 ($0.118/$0.472) with a CNY 0.2/M cache-hit rate. Verified 2026-07-11.Q · 02 Why are ERNIE prices shown in USD? +
1 CNY = $0.1475 (2026-07-10) and records the original CNY figures on each model page.Q · 03 Are ERNIE 5.x prices tiered by context length? +
Q · 04 Is ERNIE 5.0 more expensive than ERNIE 5.1? +
$0.885/$3.54) while the newer ERNIE 5.1 refresh is cheaper at CNY 4/18 ($0.59/$2.655), so 5.1 is both newer and lower-priced.