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Recently, the Alibaba subsidiary Qwen App announced that it would offer its core capabilities such as learning and document processing free to users. This move quickly attracted attention among college students. Several students shared on social platforms that if they were to calculate the subscription fees for common tools like PPT creation, data download, translation, and document writing, Qwen's free strategy could save them up to 2000 yuan in annual membership costs.
Some students said that to complete a project, they often had to switch between multiple apps: using a PPT template required an account upgrade, accessing data required paid downloads, and format conversion and paper formatting each had their own payment options. "Temporarily upgrading to a membership just to submit an assignment" had almost become routine.
Qwen provides high-frequency needs such as PPT creation, writing polishing, translation, problem solving, and information retrieval for free, which many students regard as "combining several memberships together." Some users also commented on Xiaohongshu that the saved subscription costs could "cover the price of an iPad."
College students use Qwen in various ways. After the College English Test, someone posted on Xiaohongshu that they had predicted the essay topic using the Qwen App. In addition to preparation, the app is frequently mentioned in the context of academic papers: many students use it as a "format conqueror," able to directly apply nearly 1,000 university paper templates, compressing the time-consuming tasks of adjusting headers, footers, tables of contents, and reference formats into just a few minutes.
Beneath this popularity is a collective fatigue towards "membership walls." Over the past year, AI tools for learning such as writing, translation, information retrieval, and PPT generation have been launched intensively. However, most products have fragmented their core functions and unlocked them layer by layer through subscriptions, forcing users to piece together workflows across multiple apps.