GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) Pricing
All plans and pricing as of 2026-07-09
Self-hosted (Free)
- ✓MIT license -- truly open, no MAU clauses
- ✓Full weights on Hugging Face
- ✓Commercial use fully permitted
API (Z.ai / OpenRouter, GLM-5.2)
- ✓GLM-5.2 (launched 2026-06-13): ~753B MoE, 1M context, IndexShare architecture
- ✓GLM-5.1 (2026-04-07): 744B MoE / 40B active, $0.60 in / $2.20 out (still available)
- ✓GLM-4.6V (vision): tiered
- ✓VentureBeat: ~1/6 the cost of GPT-5.5 on long-horizon coding
Is GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) Worth the Price?
Value Score: 9/10
Overall Score: 8.0/10 · Teams that need genuine MIT-licensed frontier open weights with no commercial strings. Especially strong for agentic workflows and vision (GLM-4.6V).
With GLM-5.2 (June 13, 2026), Z.ai has the strongest MIT-licensed open-weights model of 2026 -- a ~753B MoE with a 1M context, SWE-Bench Pro 62.1, and the top spot on Artificial Analysis's open-weights index, which VentureBeat says edges GPT-5.5 on long-horizon coding at a fraction of the cost. The true MIT license puts it ahead of Llama 4 on licensing, and the agentic tool-use performance beats most of its open-weight peers. GLM-4.6V is legitimately the best open multimodal model on several benchmarks. The weakness is purely ecosystem: fewer Western fine-tunes and less Ollama coverage. If you're building an agent or multimodal product and want clean licensing, GLM is the pick.
The Tier List Tuesday
Weekly newsletter: tier movers, new entrants, and the VS of the week. Built from our daily AI-tool sweeps. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
How GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) Pricing Compares
| Tool | Free Tier | Starting Price | Value Score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)(this tool) | Yes | $0 | 9/10 | 8.0 |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.8 |
| MiniMax M3 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.4 |
| Gemma 4 (Google) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.3 |
| IBM Granite 4.0 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.2 |
| Kimi K2.6 (Moonshot) | Yes | $0 | 8.5/10 | 8.1 |