GLM 5.3: price, performance and context

Open GLM 5.3 by Z.ai costs $0.04 per 1M input and $7.00 per 1M output tokens, handles up to 1M tokens in one request (≈ 3,100 pages of text) and scores 44.8 points on the AgentKernel performance index, rank 14 of 212.

Privacy: zero data retention with 27 providers, not in the EU. Availability over the last 24 h: 100%.

Updated Oct 09, 2026, 16:46 UTC · z-ai/glm-5.3

Open in the interactive comparison

Key facts

Licence: Open weights: free to download and self-host
Input / 1M tokens: $0.04
Output / 1M tokens: $7.00
Context window: 1M tokens
Max. output: 943.7K tokens
Performance index: 44.8 points · rank 14 of 212
Coding index: 74.8 points · rank 13 of 119
Agentic index: 53.1 points · rank 5 of 91
Cost at your usage: $1.79 / month
Knowledge cutoff: n/a
In the catalog since: Aug 18, 2026
Capabilities: Reasoning, Tool Calling

Placements by task

What do you get for $10.00?

Rules of thumb from the cost calculator, base rates without caching or taxes.

Task	Cost per task	For $10.00
Chat repliesA question with a short history, a detailed answer	$0.004	2,800
Email draftsBullet points in, a finished email out	$0.003	3,600
Document summariesRead 10 pages, write a one-page summary	$0.004	2,800
Code reviewsReview and comment on 500 lines of code	$0.007	1,400
Book analysesAnalyse a 300-page book in one go	$0.018	560

Cheaper with similar performance

Model	Licence	Performance	Your cost / month
Ling 3.1 FlashinclusionAI	Proprietary	41.1	$0.00
Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic	Proprietary	43.4	$0.225
GLM 5.3 FlashZ.ai	Open	41.8	$0.275

Stronger models

Model	Licence	Performance	Your cost / month
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)Qwen	Proprietary	45.4	$3.50
MiMo-V2.6-ProXiaomi	Open	46.3	$0.653
Grok 4.7xAI	Proprietary	46.4	$3.50