GLM 5 API Pricing
Zhipu · Budget · Apache 2.0 · released 2026-02. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
GLM 5 has held the same list price since 2026-08-15 and is the 140th cheapest of 142 Budget models. None of its 8 hosts undercuts the price quoted here. It holds the FinOps Friendly badge: top-40% Arena quality, top-30% Efficiency, not among the dearest 30%, and no stability flag.
- Input: $0.60 per 1M tokens
- Output: $1.92 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: $0.12
- Context window: 205K
- Arena ELO: 1457 (as of 2026-09-25)
- AWS Bedrock regions: ap-northeast-1, us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2
GLM 5 market position
On blended price ($1.52 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 1% of Budget models: 140th cheapest of 142. Across every category it is cheaper than 48% of priced text models in the catalogue: 147th cheapest of 281. Its Arena ELO of 1457 ranks 27th of the 68 models that carry one, above 61% of them.
GLM 5 licence, size and capabilities
GLM 5 is open source: its weights are published under Apache 2.0, an OSI-approved licence with no field-of-use limit, so it can be self-hosted as well as bought by the token. Its published size is 744B parameters. Listed capabilities: Text, Reasoning, Code, Agents. Filling its 205K context window once costs $0.12 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $143 – $186 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $206 – $274 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $782 – $830 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $472 – $496 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $492 – $564 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $184 – $205 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $245 – $254 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $734 – $936 |
GLM 5 pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 8 different hosts. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-09-28 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown.
The price we publish is already the cheapest of the 8 hosts: StreamLake at $0.60 input / $1.92 output per 1M tokens. It serves a quantized fp8 build, which is not the same product as the full-precision model. The dearest, Z.AI, charges 1.7x the cheapest.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| StreamLake (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.60 | $1.92 |
| GMICloud (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.60 | $1.92 |
| Baidu — fp8 | $0.70 | $2.24 |
| SiliconFlow — fp8 | $0.95 | $2.55 |
| Amazon Bedrock | $1.00 | $3.20 |
| Venice — fp8 | $1.00 | $3.20 |
| Novita — fp8 | $1.00 | $3.20 |
| Z.AI — fp8 | $1.00 | $3.20 |
GLM 5 price history
GLM 5 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.60 input / $1.92 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
Alternatives to GLM 5
- Next cheaper Budget model: Qwen3.6 Plus (Alibaba) at $1.46 blended, 4% less.
- Next more expensive: Morph V3 Large (morph) at $1.60 blended, 5% more.
The nearest Budget models on Arena ELO, each with its blended price and score difference against GLM 5.
- DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 (DeepSeek) — $0.95 in / $1.91 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1458: 6% more expensive, 1 ELO point higher
- Qwen3.7 Plus (Alibaba) — $0.32 in / $1.28 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1456: 35% cheaper, 1 ELO point lower
- GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI) — $0.20 in / $1.20 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1454: 41% cheaper, 3 ELO points lower
- GLM 5.3 Flash (Zhipu) — $0.15 in / $0.50 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1474: 74% cheaper, 17 ELO points higher
- Cheapest within 15 Arena points: GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI), 41% cheaper, 3 ELO points lower, out of 18 models in that band.
- Highest Arena ELO within 20% of this price: GLM 5.2 (Zhipu), 7% more expensive, 19 ELO points higher, out of 8 models in that price band.
Common questions about GLM 5 pricing
- How much does GLM 5 cost?
- GLM 5 costs $0.60 per million input tokens and $1.92 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does GLM 5 offer batch or cached pricing?
- Prompt-cache reads cost $0.12/M input tokens. No batch pricing is published.
- What would GLM 5 cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, GLM 5 costs about $186 at list prices.
- Has the price of GLM 5 changed?
- GLM 5 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.60 input / $1.92 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for GLM 5 in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
All models · Compare side by side · Cloud compute pricing · Price barometer · FinOps guides · API and MCP server