GLM-5.3-Flash API Providers: Speed & Cost

GLM-5.3-Flash, released by Z.ai in August 2026, is an MIT-licensed 320-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 18 billion active parameters, multimodal text, image, and video input support, and a roughly one-million-token context window. Positioned for coding and agentic workloads, it uses hybrid sparse and linear attention to reduce long-context compute and cache requirements, and is presented as a separately trained model rather than a distilled version of GLM-5.3. Artificial Analysis metrics cited in the review place its intelligence above the open-weight median, but show slower first-party generation speed, higher time-to-first-token latency, and relatively high output verbosity, making provider selection important for cost and responsiveness. The review recommends DeepInfra overall because of its full context support, OpenAI-compatible API, $0.50 per million output-token price, and approximately 83% cached-input discount, while identifying Z.ai for native features, Inco for reported high throughput, Baseten for low end-to-end latency, Bitdeer AI for budget batch processing, and Fireworks AI for enterprise reliability.

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