GLM-5.3-Flash Pricing, Providers & Cost

GLM-5.3-Flash, released by Z.ai in August 2026, is an MIT-licensed, open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 320 billion total parameters, 18 billion active parameters, text and image inputs, text outputs, and a context window of roughly one million tokens. The model is positioned for coding agents, retrieval-augmented generation, long-document analysis, and structured multimodal workflows, with reported benchmark scores suggesting comparatively strong coding and agentic performance among open-weight models. Its main tradeoffs are relatively slow output speed and high verbosity, making output-token controls, concise prompting, structured responses, and cache-friendly prompt design important for managing costs. Standard Z.ai pricing is listed at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, while DeepInfra advertises discounted rates of $0.075 input, $0.25 output, and $0.015 cached input, and OpenRouter offers multiple providers with varying prices, latency, and routing options. DeepInfra presents itself as especially suitable for cost-sensitive, cache-heavy, long-context, and high-volume deployments, though the text advises teams to compare their actual token mix, cache-hit rates, output volume, and operational needs before selecting an API provider or considering self-hosting.

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