The GLM Coding Plan is Z.ai’s subscription that sells access to the GLM model family inside coding agents, currently $18/$80/$168 per month for Lite/Pro/Max. It is the cheapest quota-per-dollar coding subscription I verified, but a multiplier system governs the quota, so the sticker price is only the start of the math.
What it is #
A credit-based subscription from Z.ai (Zhipu) for GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-Flash, consumed inside supported coding tools (Claude Code, Cline, OpenCode, Kilo Code, Cursor, Z.ai’s own ZCode, and others). You point the tool at Z.ai’s Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible endpoints with a plan key, and requests to older GLM versions are auto-routed to 5.3. Plans bundle exclusive MCP servers (vision, web search, web reader, Zread). Usage outside officially supported tools is contractually prohibited, which makes this a walled-garden subscription rather than an API credit pack.
Status #
Actively developed and restructured twice in a year: prompt-based plans at launch in 2025, then a credits-based system for new subscribers on July 30, 2026, with legacy plans grandfathered to the end of their billing cycle. The plan rode the GLM release cadence (GLM-4.5 in 2025, GLM-5.2 in June 2026, GLM-5.3 in August 2026), and tier prices rose at each step. Promotional quota mechanics (off-peak discounts, Flash campaigns) changed repeatedly through 2026, so published value figures have a short shelf life. I found no reliable subscriber counts.
Strengths #
- Quota per dollar is unmatched in this category: Z.ai itself documents quota worth approximately 15-30x the monthly fee at API rates.
- Lite at $18, or $12.60 effective on yearly billing, undercuts every $20 rival I checked.
- On the credits plan, off-peak usage (outside Mon-Fri 14:00-18:00 UTC+8) deducts credits at 50% and weekends count as off-peak all day; a promotion that charged all usage at the off-peak rate ran September 25 to October 7, 2026 and ended as scheduled.
- Hard-stop quota means spend is fixed: when quota runs out, calls pause and your account balance is never touched.
Cautions #
- Subscriptions are non-refundable once purchased, per the official FAQ.
- The 3x peak burn applies to legacy prompt plans only; on the July credits plan the flagship deducts at 1x at peak and 0.5x off-peak, so the worst-case throughput penalty is now a legacy-subscriber problem.
- Strict supported-tools-only terms and special endpoints block custom integrations.
- Third-party reviewers report slow and unreliable periods under load, and prompts route through China-based infrastructure, a blocker for residency-bound teams.
Pricing #
Current tiers as of 2026-10-14: Lite $18/month (per Z.ai docs), Pro $80 and Max $168 per August 2026 snapshots of the subscribe page, with 20% off quarterly and 30% off yearly billing (effective $12.60/$56/$117.60 per month). The July 2026 credits system allocates 2,000/10,000 credits per 5 hours/week on Lite, 12,000/60,000 on Pro, 28,000/140,000 on Max. Credits deduct per token type with multipliers (GLM-5.3: input 6.9, cached input 1.7, output 24; GLM-5.3-Flash: 2.3/0.56/8, divided by 10,000), plus per-call charges for bundled MCP tools. Peak hours (Mon-Fri 14:00-18:00 UTC+8) bill at 1x and off-peak at 0.5x on the credits plan, weekends bill at the off-peak rate, and a promotion charged all usage at the off-peak rate from September 25 to October 7, 2026 (ended as scheduled; docs.z.ai re-fetched 2026-10-10 with the promotion no longer listed). Under the legacy prompts system, Z.ai documented quota as roughly 80/400/1,600 prompts per 5-hour window, with the flagship burning at 3x during peak hours, and one prompt estimated at 15-20 model invocations.
Price history #
| Date | Plan | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09 | Lite / Pro | Baseline: launched at $6/$30 per month with first-month promos of $3/$15 | Cline blog, Sep 18, 2025 |
| 2026-06-18 | Lite / Pro / Max | List prices $18/$72/$160, yearly effective $12.60/$50.40/$112 | HyScaler |
| 2026-07-30 | All plans | Credits-based plans replace prompt-based plans for new subscribers | docs.z.ai usage-revision notice |
| 2026-08-14 | Lite / Pro / Max | Pro to $80 and Max to $168; 20% quarterly and 30% yearly discounts | emergent.sh |
Compared to #
- Cerebras Code sells speed at $50/$200; choose it when latency dominates, GLM when volume per dollar dominates.
- Chutes sells cheap pay-as-you-go across many model families; choose it for flexibility, GLM for a large fixed quota on one frontier family.
- Z.ai’s own ZCode is the intended surface, but any supported harness works with the same quota.
Bottom line #
Recommended for high-volume, human-in-the-loop coding where quota per dollar is the binding constraint and you can work off-peak. Not for long-horizon autonomous agent runs (aggregator tracking puts GLM-5.2 at about half of Claude Opus 4.8’s SWE-Marathon score), Claude-ecosystem power users, or residency-bound teams. Claim to disagree with: the rational entry is a single month of $18 Lite and never the discounted yearly plan, because the plan is non-refundable and its terms changed twice in a year.
Changes #
- 2026-09-26 - Created.
- 2026-10-04 - Corrected the peak-burn mechanics: the 3x flagship multiplier belongs to the legacy prompt plans, while the July credits plan bills 1x at peak and 0.5x off-peak (weekends off-peak all day, and an all-day off-peak promotion runs September 25 to October 7, 2026); GLM-5.3-Flash multipliers added.
- 2026-10-06 - Cleaned the Compared-to and See also link labels (stray leading dashes inside the link text), with the docs re-verified unchanged.
- 2026-10-10 - The all-usage off-peak promotion (September 25 to October 7) ended as scheduled and is gone from the docs page; the standing 0.5x off-peak rule, credit allowances, credit multipliers, and the $18 Lite entry re-verified unchanged.
See also #
- Cerebras Code - the speed-first alternative subscription.
- Chutes - the cheap multi-model alternative.
- ZCode - Z.ai’s own coding surface for this plan.
- Cline - one of the first tools the plan targeted.
- Model selection for coding tasks - how to decide whether GLM models fit your tasks.
References #
https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview - current credit allowances (2,000/12,000/28,000 per 5h), credit formula, off-peak 50% rule, “starting at 18 USD” (fetched, HTTP 200; re-fetched 2026-10-14 with allowances, multipliers, and the no-promotion state unchanged).
https://cline.bot/blog/zai-cline-3-dollar-ai-coding - launch-era pricing: $6/$30 with $3/$15 first-month promos, 120/600 prompts per 5 hours (fetched, HTTP 200, Sep 18, 2025).
https://hyscaler.com/insights/glm-coding-plan-review/ - June 2026 tiers at $18/$72/$160, 3x peak multiplier, competitive framing (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/glm-coding-plan-worth-it-2026-value-analysis - critical analysis, Jul 3, 2026: multiplier math, non-refundability, China residency, long-horizon benchmark gap (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://emergent.sh/learn/glm-5-3-pricing - August 2026 tiers at $18/$80/$168 with yearly equivalents; GLM-5.3 has no per-token API rate yet (fetched, HTTP 200).