Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Open-weights frontier LLM family from Zhipu AI
Overview
Z.ai is the international developer brand for Zhipu AI's GLM family of bilingual (Chinese/English) language models. The current flagship is GLM-5.2, alongside the speed-tuned GLM-5-Turbo, plus GLM-4.7 and GLM-4.5-Air on paid tiers. GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are free for all registered users. Consumer access via chatglm.cn (Zhipu Qingyan, the separate Chinese consumer brand); international developers use the docs.z.ai API, which is OpenAI-compatible.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash free
- API access at $0 for flash tier
- GLM-4.7: $0.60/M in, $2.20/M out
- GLM-5.2: $1.40/M in, $4.40/M out
- FlashX from $0.07/M input
- ~80 prompts per 5 hours
- Access to GLM-5.2 / GLM-4.7
- 30% promo pricing through Sep 2026
- ~400 prompts per 5 hours
- Same models as Lite, bigger allowance
- ~1,600 prompts per 5 hours
- Highest weekly quota
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
The GLM series is still the strongest value play among frontier-adjacent APIs, and 2026 made Zhipu impossible to ignore: a January Hong Kong IPO (the first listed LLM company), GLM-5 in February, and GLM-5.2 in June with a 1M-token context that tops open-weight coding benchmarks. The z.ai endpoint is OpenAI-compatible with English docs, the Coding Plan (from US$18/month) slots into Claude Code and Cline, and free Flash tiers remain. Two caveats. Pricing keeps ratcheting — GLM-5 landed with a roughly 30% API increase and the old promos are gone, so budget on published rates. And it's a China-headquartered provider: teams with PDPA/GDPR, data-residency or procurement constraints should verify where inference runs and what gets logged. For cost-sensitive ASEAN builders, the price-performance is genuinely hard to beat.
What people say
HK$116.20 to HK$1,825 in six months. Zhipu's January 8, 2026 Hong Kong IPO — ticker 2513.HK, the first pure LLM company to list anywhere — turned into a roughly 1,500% run, followed by a share placement priced at HK$1,588 aiming to raise around US$4 billion. Whatever else is true of the GLM models, the company behind them is no longer a scrappy Beijing lab.
The models kept pace. GLM-5 arrived in February 2026 with strong coding and reasoning numbers — and a roughly 30% API price increase, the year's first hike. GLM-5.2 followed on June 13 with a 1M-token context window and top marks on several open-weight coding benchmarks. Even after the hikes, the arithmetic favours Zhipu hard: GLM-5 lists at $1.00 per million input tokens and $3.20 per million output, versus multiples of that for Claude Opus-class models. The z.ai API is OpenAI-compatible, the docs are in English, and the GLM Coding Plan (from US$18/month) plugs into Claude Code, Cline and OpenCode. Free Flash-tier models still exist for registered users.
The unresolved question is governance, not capability. This is a China-headquartered provider, so anyone with PDPA/GDPR exposure, data-residency requirements or fussy procurement needs to establish where inference runs and what gets retained — the documentation is thinner here than the model cards are. And the pricing history (promos retired, a steady pattern of upward moves through 2026) says budget on today's published rates, not the deal that got you in. For ASEAN developers chasing price-performance, though, this is the benchmark everyone else gets measured against.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Z.ai (Zhipu GLM) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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