GLM-5.3 vs Kimi K3
GLM-5.3 is the better buy: the AIGROW small-business benchmark cannot tell the two apart, and GLM-5.3 has the lower list price. GLM-5.3 passed 18 of 20 tasks and costs $1.40 in and $4.40 out per million tokens; Kimi K3 passed 19 and costs $3 in and $15 out.
AIGROW credit covers Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.2, Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra, Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra, Grok 4.7 and Gemini 4 Argon. See API credit
$25 a month brings $110 of API credit and cancels any time; $25 once buys $100. US dollars, standard rate, shortest context band. Cost per pass from the AIGROW small-business benchmark. Newer comparison: GLM-5.3 vs Kimi K3.1 Pro
- GLM-5.3
- $7.02
- Tasks passed
- 18 of 20
- Kimi K3
- $18.44
- Tasks passed
- 19 of 20
AIGROW small-business benchmark, failed runs included.
Open-weight frontier models released within two months of each other, with Kimi costing two to three times as much. GLM-5.3 costs $7.02 per 1,000 passing answers on the AIGROW small-business benchmark, Kimi K3 $18.44. 1,000 support replies cost $15.00 on Kimi K3 and $5.96 on GLM-5.3, so Kimi K3 costs 2.5 times as much.
What each one costs
The API price per million tokens and the cheapest app plan with each model, from the makers’ own pages. Each name opens that model’s full price page.
Side by side
Each maker’s published rate for its standard tier. Cached input is what a repeated prompt prefix costs once the provider has stored it.
What a job costs on each
1,000 runs of each job at the two list prices. The gap moves from job to job because the models price input, output and cached context differently.
| Job | GLM-5.3 | Kimi K3 | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $5.96 | $15.00 | GLM-5.3, 60% less |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $39.40 | $90.00 | GLM-5.3, 56% less |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $45.40 | $96.00 | GLM-5.3, 53% less |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are the makers’. A model with no published cache price bills the agent task’s repeated context at its full input rate.
The small print
What each base rate leaves out, from the makers’ own pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
- GLM-5.3
- Cached-input storage is 'Limited-time Free'. Max output 128K. Open weights on Hugging Face (zai-org/GLM-5.3). Z.ai’s pricing page
- Kimi K3
- Moonshot now calls it the previous-generation K3, next to Kimi K3.1 Pro. Cache write $3 (5 min TTL) or $6 (1 h TTL). Open weights on Hugging Face (moonshotai/Kimi-K3). Changelog gives the month only. Moonshot AI’s pricing page
Other comparisons
Every head to head on the list that involves GLM-5.3 or Kimi K3.
Compare GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 with 52 other models
The price list sets every model’s input and output price side by side, with what a support reply, a document summary and an agent task cost on each.
Prices checked 12 November 2026