GLM-5.1 Pricing Guide: API Cost Comparison & Analysis

DeepInfra's GLM-5.1 Pricing Guide outlines the economic considerations and provider options for deploying the GLM-5.1 model, which was released in April 2026 by Z.AI. This model is optimized for long-horizon, tool-using engineering tasks with a large context window of approximately 203,000 tokens. Across 10 benchmarked API providers, pricing varies significantly from $0.74 to $1.70 per million tokens, with DeepInfra offering the lowest blended price and explicit cached input pricing, making it an attractive choice for cost-sensitive, input-heavy, and cache-friendly workloads. Fireworks stands out for speed, Wafer for balance, and OpenRouter for managed access. The guide highlights the importance of understanding token costs, especially for workloads with repeated input patterns, and advises modeling token costs before selecting a provider to avoid unexpected expenses. DeepInfra is recommended for engineering and agentic applications due to its competitive pricing structure, including a unique cached input pricing feature, while Fireworks is preferred for latency-sensitive tasks.