AiCostCompare

GLM 5

by Z.ai · z-ai/glm-5 · #229 cheapest of 422 paid models

Prices updated Sep 19, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC · refreshed hourly

GLM-5 is Z.ai’s flagship open-source foundation model engineered for complex systems design and long-horizon agent workflows. Built for expert developers, it delivers production-grade performance on large-scale programming tasks, rivaling leading...

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Pricing

Input

$0.60

per 1M tokens

Output

$1.92

per 1M tokens

Blended (3:1)

$0.93

3 input : 1 output

Cache read

$0.12

per 1M cached tokens

Cache write

per 1M tokens

Cache & batch economics

Effective prices for GLM 5 with prompt caching.

Cache hit rateEffective blended $/1MExample request*vs no cache
0%$0.93$0.0631
50%$0.75$0.0391−38%
90%$0.606$0.0199−68%

*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates (available for OpenAI / Anthropic / Google — not flagged for this creator). Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.

What a request costs

WorkloadInput tokensOutput tokensCost / requestCost / 1K requests
Short chat message500300$0.000876$0.876
Document summary8,0001,000$0.00672$6.72
Codebase question (RAG)30,0002,000$0.0218$21.84
Long-context analysis150,0005,000$0.0996$99.60

Performance

Intelligence Index

AA composite quality

Coding Index

Math Index

Agentic Index

Output speed

median

Time to first token

median

Time to first answer

after reasoning tokens

Design Arena Elo

CategoryElo
Website1,260
Full-stack1,132
Mobile apps1,165
Android native1,159
UI components1,246
Data viz1,243
SVG1,192
3D1,257
Game dev1,258
Godot game dev1,144
HTML slides1,150
Code categories1,261
ASCII art1,166

Specs

Context window

205K

tokens

Max output

128K

tokens

Input modalities

text

Tokenizer

Other