Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash.
Open-weights multimodal model from Z.ai with 320B total and 18B active parameters, hybrid sparse and linear attention, and adjustable reasoning effort, under the MIT licence.
2× AMD MI300X · $1.00/hr.
Most-aggressive quantisation we have a working recommendation for. Lower precision = less VRAM = cheaper hardware, at a small accuracy cost.
Cheapest hosted endpoints.
Variants in the GLM family.
glm-5.3
GLM-5.3 uses the same base model as GLM-5.2 — every gain comes from post-trai...
GLM-4.5
Zhipu's frontier open-weight MoE — 355B total, 32B active. Strong agentic + r...
GLM-4.5-Air
Smaller, cheaper sibling of GLM-4.5. 106B total, 12B active.
GLM-5.1
Zhipu's GLM 5.1 series — successor to GLM-5 on z.ai's API.
GLM-5
Zhipu's GLM 5 generation — closed flagship between GLM-4.7 and GLM-5.1.
GLM-5 Turbo
Faster, cheaper sibling of GLM-5 on z.ai.
GLM-4.7
Open-weights coding model from Z.ai for English and Chinese, improving on GLM...
GLM-4.6
Open-weights English and Chinese text model from Z.ai with a 200K token conte...
GLM-4.5-Flash
Lowest-latency, lowest-cost variant of GLM-4.5 on z.ai.
Z.ai: GLM 5.2
Open-weights text model from Z.ai for long-horizon coding and agent work, wit...
Z.ai: GLM 5.3 FlashX
GLM-5.3-FlashX is the high-speed variant of Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, a native mu...
Z.ai: GLM 5.3 FlashX Legal
GLM-5.3-FlashX-Legal (GLM-Legal) is Z.ai's legal-domain variant of GLM-5.3-Fl...
Z.ai: GLM 4 32B
GLM 4 32B is a cost-effective foundation language model. It can efficiently p...
Z.ai: GLM 4.7 Flash
As a 30B-class SOTA model, GLM-4.7-Flash offers a new option that balances pe...
Z.ai: GLM 5V Turbo
GLM-5V-Turbo is Z.ai’s first native multimodal agent foundation model, built ...
Cheapest hardware per quantisation.
Each row is one quantisation tier (the same weights compressed differently). Lower precision → lower VRAM → cheaper hardware, at the cost of small accuracy loss. $/hr refreshed hourly from each provider's API.
| Quantisation | Cheapest GPU config | Total VRAM | Live $/hr | tokens/sec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
FP16
FP16 — half precision (default)
|
1536 GB | $4.00/hr | — | Compare → | |
|
FP8
FP8 — 8-bit float (Hopper / Blackwell)
|
768 GB | $2.00/hr | — | Compare → | |
|
INT4
INT4 — 4-bit integer (~4× VRAM saving)
|
384 GB | $1.00/hr | — | Compare → |
What it costs per month across providers.
Estimate your monthly bill for Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash across every host that publishes per-token pricing. Slide your token volumes; the chart + table re-rank cheapest-first.
Cheapest provider on the left.
Total monthly cost — input + output tokens combined.
Bill breakdown.
Rent the GPU instead of paying per token.
For an open-weights model like Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash, you can rent a GPU and serve inference yourself. The math: cheapest GPU rental × 730 hours/month + your electricity rate × power draw.
Assumes the GPU runs 24/7 at ~85% utilisation. If your traffic is bursty, you'll pay less for the API and probably more for the GPU (idle hours still cost rental). The breakeven analysis lives on the Self-host vs API breakeven tool.
About Z.ai: GLM 5.3 Flash.
The first natively multimodal model in Z.ai's GLM-5 series, taking images and text and producing text. It has 320B total parameters with 18B active per token, and a hybrid of sparse and linear attention that lowers the cost of serving long contexts. A reasoning effort setting offers low, high and max levels, with max as the default. Weights are open under the MIT licence for English and Chinese. Z.ai positions it as a step up from GLM-5.2 for coding and agent workloads.