THE TICKER · Z.AI · CHECKED DAILY · LAST CHANGE 2026-09-30
Z.AI API PRICING
Second-most-used model on the board, and it took us until September to notice.
Z.ai is here because leaving it out made this board a worse index than it claims to be: GLM 5.3 Flash alone was 11.2% of every token OpenRouter served last week — second overall, ahead of every western model we track except DeepSeek — while our board covered 38% of the traffic it says it measures. Adding the two GLM models took that to 51%. The pricing is the flat, unfussy kind: no peak hours, no introductory rate with an expiry, output at a 3.1x multiple on 5.3 and 3.3x on Flash. The one number worth knowing is the cached read on Flash, $0.03/MTok — a fifth of the price of the cheapest uncached input on this entire board, and the reason a repeated prefix costs essentially nothing here. Cache storage is free for now, which is a promise with no date on it and therefore one to re-read.
THE Z.AI LINEUP
USD PER MILLION TOKENS · 2026-10-13| Model | Input / MTok | Output / MTok | Multiple | Cached read | Cache write |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 | $1.40 | $4.40 | 3.1x | $0.260 | $0.000 |
| GLM 5.3 Flash The most-used model on this board by OpenRouter token share, western or not. | $0.150 | $0.500 | 3.3x | $0.030 | $0.000 |
Source: docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing · last confirmed against the daily source on 2026-10-14 · effective public price, promos included.
ONE JOB ACROSS THE Z.AI LINEUP
Estimates, not invoices.
Z.AI CHANGELOG
GLM 5.3 Flash joins the board at $0.15 in / $0.50 out per MTok — 11.2% of all OpenRouter tokens last week, more than any western model we track except DeepSeek.
GLM 5.3 joins the board at $1.40 in / $4.40 out per MTok — the first Chinese open models we track, after a board that covered 38% of the traffic it claims to index.