GLM-5.3 API pricing per million tokens
GLM-5.3 costs $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output, with a 1M context window.
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 per million tokens, standard rate, shortest context band. Number 32 of 256 on the Epoch Capabilities Index by Epoch AI, data of 12 November 2026. CC BY 4.0
- 1,000 support replies
- $5.96
- Cached input
- $0.26
- Context window
- 1,000,000 tokens
- Released
- 18 Aug 2026
- Weights
- Open weights
From Z.ai’s own pages, 12 November 2026.
GLM-5.3 costs $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens on Z.ai’s own API, and $0.26 for cached input. At those prices 1,000 support replies cost $5.96, the 23rd most expensive of 49 priced models on our list.
AIGROW API credit per million input / output tokens: Claude Opus 5.5 $1.60 / $8.00, Claude Fable 5.2 $3.20 / $16.00, Claude Fable 5.1 $4.00 / $20.00, GPT-6 Astra $2.50 / $12.50, Claude Sonnet 5.5 $0.80 / $4.00, GPT-6.1 Sol $0.50 / $2.50, GPT-6.1 Terra $0.25 / $1.25, Grok 4.7 $0.50 / $1.50 and Gemini 4 Argon $1.00 / $5.00. That is up to 75% below list price. See API credit
What a job costs
Three jobs, 1,000 runs of each, at the list price above, and where each puts GLM-5.3 among the 49 models with a list price.
| Job | 1,000 runs | Among 49 |
|---|---|---|
| Support reply3,000 in, 400 out. | $5.96 | 23rd most expensive |
| Document summary25,000 in, 1,000 out. | $39.40 | 23rd most expensive |
| Agent task80,000 in (70,000 cached), 3,000 out. | $45.40 | 24th most expensive |
The token counts are ours, chosen to look like real work; the prices are Z.ai’s. All three jobs stay under 100,000 tokens a request, below every long-context surcharge on the list.
GLM-5.3 on real small-business tasks
What the AIGROW benchmark measured when GLM-5.3 was given 20 office tasks, each marked pass or fail by fixed checks.
- Success rate
- 90% of 20 runs passed (95% interval 70 to 97%), 4th of 36 models.
- Cost per 1,000 passes
- $7.02, failed runs included.
- Answer time
- 9.2 s median, 31 s at the 90th percentile.
- Strongest and weakest
- Appointment scheduling (100% passed) and review replies (0%).
The small print
What the base rate above leaves out, copied from the maker’s pages: surcharges, discounts, promotions and cache pricing.
Cached-input storage is 'Limited-time Free'. Max output 128K. Open weights on Hugging Face (zai-org/GLM-5.3).
GLM-5.3 against the models it is weighed with
Each comparison puts both list prices side by side and costs the same three jobs on each.
- vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
- Open-weight Chinese frontier models in the same price range.
- vs Kimi K3
- Open-weight frontier models released within two months of each other, with Kimi costing two to three times as much.
- vs Kimi K3.1 Pro
- Two open-weight frontier models from China, with Kimi K3.1 Pro dearer on input and over twice the price on output.
Other Z.ai models
| Model | Input | Output | Context | 1,000 replies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.3-FlashZ.ai · open weights | $0.15 | $0.50 | 1M | $0.65 |
Where the price comes from
Read on 12 November 2026. Each price is the standard rate for the shortest context band, with no batch or priority discount; long-context surcharges, batch rates and promotions are in each model’s small print. No price was taken from a reseller.
Compare GLM-5.3 with 53 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 · See them by release date