Z.ai · AI model API pricing

How much does GLM-5.2 cost?

Zhipu's newest flagship — frontier-class ambitions with output tokens cheaper than most Western budget tiers.

Rate card

What that means per month

Standard on-demand rates from Z.ai's official pricing docs, last checked 2026-07-28. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.

Where GLM-5.2 sits on price

At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, GLM-5.2 costs $27.2, which makes it the 17th cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 16× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among frontier-class models it is the cheapest of 10.

Cache economics

Cached input on GLM-5.2 bills at $0.26 per 1M — 19% of its own input rate, against a 10% median across the models here that publish a cached-read price. 24 models discount cached reads more steeply than this. On the reference month, serving 80% of that input from cache takes the input side of the bill from $14 to $4.88, leaving output untouched at $13.2 — which is why a high reuse rate changes the ranking above rather than just shaving the total.

Cache reads only. Writes are billed separately by some providers and are excluded here — see the rate note above for Z.ai's terms. Try it at your own hit rate on the AI cost calculator.

Cheaper alternatives

At a reference workload of 10M input / 3M output tokens a month, these cost less than GLM-5.2 ($27.2/mo):

• DeepSeek V4 Pro $25.1/mo
• Claude Haiku 4.5 $25/mo
• Kimi K2.6 $21.5/mo

GLM-5.2 head-to-head