If you are looking at the GLM Coding Plan, you are probably doing the same sum I did: Claude Code is the best agent I have used, the good plans cost real money, and here is Z.ai offering its GLM models inside the same Claude Code terminal for a fraction of the price. The pricing page will tell you what each tier costs. It will not tell you whether the cheaper model is actually cheaper once you count the time you spend fixing its work, or what happens to your quota when an agent starts writing long files.
I paid for the GLM Coding Plan on its top tier while I was testing it, then cancelled it. I also pay for Claude Code on a Max 20x seat this month. The question underneath the search is whether to put your money on GLM or on Claude, and I answer it below.
The short answer: the GLM Coding Plan is genuinely good, better than I expected on front-end work, and its main advantage over Claude is price. If price is your binding constraint, the Lite tier is the cheapest serious way to run an agentic coding setup. If you bill for your time or ship code most days, the quality gap costs you more than the subscription saves, and Claude Code on a Max plan wins. Below is the current pricing, what a “credit” actually buys, the exact config to try GLM inside Claude Code without breaking your existing setup, and how to decide in one week.
On this page
GLM Coding Plan pricing and limits in October 2026
Z.ai rebuilt the plan around credits on July 30, 2026. Older reviews still quote the previous Pro and Max prices, so check the date on anything you read. These are the current list prices from the Z.ai subscribe page and the quotas from the GLM Coding Plan overview in Z.ai’s docs:
| Tier | Monthly | Credits per 5 hours | Credits per week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | $18 | 2,000 | 10,000 |
| Pro | $80 | 12,000 | 60,000 |
| Max | $168 | 28,000 | 140,000 |
Quarterly billing takes 20 percent off and yearly billing takes 30 percent off, and Z.ai often runs a first-period discount on top. Before the July change the tiers were $18, $72 and $160, and existing subscribers keep their old terms until their billing cycle ends, which is why you will see both sets of numbers quoted.
Every tier includes GLM-5.3 and the faster GLM-5.3-Flash. If a tool asks for GLM-5.2 or GLM-5.1, the plan routes the request to GLM-5.3. Lite is meant for one project at a time; higher tiers allow more concurrent requests.
Two limits run at once, which is the same shape as Claude’s plans: a rolling five-hour window and a weekly cap. The five-hour quota resets five hours after you consume it, and the weekly quota resets every seven days from when you subscribed.
What a credit actually buys (worked example)
This is the part no pricing table explains, and it decides whether Lite is enough for you. Z.ai’s docs give the formula:
credits = (input x 6.9 + cached input x 1.7 + output x 24) / 10,000 # GLM-5.3
credits = (input x 2.3 + cached input x 0.56 + output x 8) / 10,000 # GLM-5.3-Flash
Read the multipliers carefully. On GLM-5.3 an output token costs about 3.5 times an uncached input token, and about 14 times a cached one. Agents that write long files, long plans or long test suites burn quota far faster than agents that mostly read.
Here is one typical agent task, worked through. Say a session reads 1,000,000 tokens of your codebase, 950,000 of them from cache, and writes 40,000 tokens of code and explanation:
(50,000 x 6.9) + (950,000 x 1.7) + (40,000 x 24) = 2,920,000
2,920,000 / 10,000 = 292 credits
On Lite that is about 6 such tasks per five-hour window and about 34 per week. On Pro it is about 41 per window and 205 per week. Off-peak use is charged at half rate (peak is Monday to Friday, 14:00 to 18:00 Singapore time, which is 06:00 to 10:00 UTC), so the same task costs 146 credits outside those hours.
Z.ai’s own estimate, assuming a 95 percent cache hit rate on GLM-5.3, is roughly 48 to 97 million tokens a week on Lite, 290 to 580 million on Pro and 676 million to 1.35 billion on Max. My worked example works out to roughly 36 million tokens a week on Lite, a little under Z.ai’s range, because it includes a realistic amount of output. Plan for that lower number.
What I found when I actually paid for it
In the last year I have paid for Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor and GLM through Z.ai’s Coding Plan, each on its top plan while I tested it, plus DeepSeek through its API. The GLM plan was one of the two subscriptions I cancelled; Cursor was the other.
It was good, and better than I expected on front-end work. I cancelled it on arithmetic. My personal AI spend runs at about $500 to $600 a month, of which Claude is $400 to $500: a Max 20x seat plus two Team seats I keep for the connectors. Moving work to GLM would have saved me $100 to $200 a month, and in exchange I would be using a model I already knew was not the best one available to me. For someone running eight products, that trade is backwards. The hours lost to re-prompting and fixing are worth far more than the saving.
A cheaper model only saves money if you do not spend the difference fixing what it wrote.
There is a second reason the price gap matters less than it looks. At API list prices, the 15 to 20 billion tokens I put through these tools each month would cost $15,000 to $20,000. Claude and ChatGPT both sell that heavy usage on a $200 tier, which is a subsidy only the companies that own the models can afford to hand out. By the same logic, Z.ai owns GLM, which plausibly explains why its plan can be this cheap. That is the same structural argument I made about Cursor’s pricing: the labs that own their models can undercut everyone else, and GLM is one of those labs.
What I kept instead was a DeepSeek API key, for trivial-but-long jobs, purely so they do not eat into my Claude weekly limits. If you want a cheap overflow lane rather than a replacement, that is a pattern worth copying with GLM as well.
Is GLM better than Claude? Where each one wins
My split for real work is Claude for anything involving UI, UX or a whole feature end to end, and Codex for complex backend work, which is the head-to-head I wrote up in Codex vs Claude Code. GLM does not displace either of those for me. Where it does belong is lower on the price curve, and my view of open models has moved a long way.
In 2024 I wanted to build on open-source models for EU and regulated-industry clients. I evaluated them seriously and abandoned the idea because quality was too poor and too unpredictable, and I moved to frontier models instead. When I costed self-hosting at the time, it came to a Mac Studio at $5,000 to $10,000 plus $200 to $800 a month in running costs for a small team.
GLM 5.2 changed my mind. I put about 50 million tokens through it in 24 hours, and it was the first open model I rated between Claude 4.6 and 4.8, which is the first time an open model has cleared my bar for real work. One honest caveat: the plan now serves GLM-5.3 when you ask for 5.2, and I have not run 5.3 at that volume, so treat my rating as a floor for the current model, not a measurement of it.
So here is the decision, by reader type:
| If you are… | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping code most working days, or billing for your time | Claude Code on Max 5x or Max 20x | The quality gap costs more hours than the plan saves |
| A hobbyist or student coding in the evenings | GLM Coding Plan Lite | Cheapest serious way to run a Claude Code style agent |
| Already on Claude and hitting the weekly cap | Keep Claude, add GLM Lite or a pay-as-you-go API key for long, simple jobs | Protects your Claude limits without switching tools |
| Doing front-end work on a tight budget | GLM Coding Plan Lite, then Pro only if you hit the cap | GLM surprised me most on front-end, though Claude still wins whole-feature UI work |
| Handling data that cannot leave approved jurisdictions | Neither hosted plan; look at self-hosting open weights | Check where the provider processes your code first |
My ranked verdict: for anyone whose time is the expensive input, Claude Code on a Max plan is first, the GLM Coding Plan as an overflow lane next to Claude is second, and the GLM Coding Plan as your only tool is third. It earns that third place on price alone, and for some readers price is the right thing to optimize. For a deeper look at what the Claude side costs, I broke down every tier in Claude Code pricing.
Try GLM inside Claude Code without breaking your setup
You do not need to choose blind. The GLM Coding Plan speaks the same protocol Claude Code uses, so you can run both from the same terminal and compare them on your own work. Z.ai’s Claude Code setup page tells you to put the config in ~/.claude/settings.json. I would not, because that replaces Claude for every session. Put it in its own file and load it only when you want GLM.
Step 1. Create an API key in your Z.ai account, then save this as ~/.claude/glm-settings.json (the values are Z.ai’s current recommended config; paste your key in place of the placeholder):
{
"env": {
"ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN": "your_zai_api_key",
"ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "glm-5.3-flash[1m]",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "glm-5.3[1m]",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "glm-5.3[1m]",
"CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW": "1000000",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1",
"API_TIMEOUT_MS": "3000000"
}
}
The [1m] suffix and the compact-window setting give you the one-million-token context window. The long timeout is there because GLM responses can be slow at peak.
Step 2. Lock the file down and add a shortcut to your shell profile:
chmod 600 ~/.claude/glm-settings.json
echo "alias claude-glm='claude --settings ~/.claude/glm-settings.json'" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
Now claude is still Claude, and claude-glm is the same tool running GLM. The --settings flag overrides only the keys in that file, for that session only, and leaves your normal settings untouched. Everything else you have built carries over: your CLAUDE.md, your MCP servers, and any skills, including the free Claude skills I publish on Locul, which load the same way whichever model is answering. How faithfully a skill gets followed does depend on the model.
Step 3. Run the one-week trial below before you prepay anything.
The one-week trial I would run before paying for a year
- Pay monthly first. The yearly discount is real, but it locks you in before you know whether the model fits your work.
- Pick three real tasks you already did in Claude: one UI change, one backend change, one long refactor. Run each in
claude-glmand compare the result with what Claude produced. - Write down the credits each task used. Your usage page shows it. Multiply by how many such tasks you do in a week and check it against your tier’s weekly cap.
- Run at least one session inside peak hours (06:00 to 10:00 UTC on weekdays) and one outside, so you see the speed and the half-rate pricing both ways.
- Count timeouts and retries. One a day is an annoyance. One an hour is a different product.
- Decide on time, not on the bill. Add up the minutes you spent correcting GLM’s output. If that time is worth more to you than the price difference, stay on Claude.
What Reddit gets right about the GLM Coding Plan
The Reddit threads on this plan are blunt, and most of the complaints are fair. Here is how I read them.
“The quota disappears faster than you expect.” This is the loudest complaint in the r/opencodeCLI value-for-money thread: on Lite, a single code review that fans out subagents can eat a large slice of your five-hour window in one sitting, and users report burning a full week’s quota in about two days. That matches the credit maths above: subagents multiply reads, and reviews generate a lot of output. On Lite, run one project at a time and do not fan out subagents.
“The subscription is slower than the pay-as-you-go API.” Max-tier subscribers in more than one thread describe throttling at busy times, and one said the metered API was much faster than the subscription. That is why Z.ai’s own config sets a very long timeout, and it is the reason for step 4 in the trial.
“It is still behind Claude and Codex.” In my experience, yes, for the work I do. The gap is real but narrower than it was in 2024, and for front-end work GLM surprised me. Whether “behind” matters depends on the time test in step 6.
“Prices went up.” They did change. The July 30, 2026 credits model moved Pro from $72 to $80 and Max from $160 to $168. Older reviews quoting the lower prices are out of date, not wrong.
“My code goes to a provider in China.” Z.ai, the company behind GLM, is based in China, and your prompts and code are processed by its service. If a client contract or a regulator says where your code may go, check Z.ai’s terms before you paste in anyone else’s repository. If the answer is no, self-hosting open weights is the route, and GLM 5.2 is the first open model I would consider for it.
FAQ
Is the GLM Coding Plan worth it?
Yes, if price is your main constraint or you want a cheap overflow lane next to Claude. No, if you code professionally every day and your time is the expensive input. I paid for it, rated it genuinely good, and cancelled it because the saving did not cover the quality gap for my work.
How much does the GLM Coding Plan cost per month?
As of October 2026: Lite $18, Pro $80 and Max $168 a month, with 20 percent off quarterly and 30 percent off yearly. Check the subscribe page before buying, because the plan was repriced on July 30, 2026.
Why does the GLM Coding Plan feel expensive at the higher tiers?
The $80 and $168 tiers can look steep for a lesser-known model, but measured against API list pricing they are a discount, not a premium. The tokens a Max subscriber can burn in a week would cost hundreds of dollars metered, so Z.ai, which owns GLM, is subsidising its own model to win the seat. The real cost question is not the sticker, it is how much of your time goes into fixing the output.
Which GLM model is best for coding?
GLM-5.3 for real coding work and GLM-5.3-Flash for quick, cheap tasks. Every tier includes both, and requests for older versions are routed to them.
Is GLM better than Claude?
Not for my work. GLM 5.2 was the first open model I rated between Claude 4.6 and 4.8, which makes it good enough for real work, but Claude still wins on UI, UX and whole-feature builds.
Is GLM cheaper than Claude?
On the sticker price, yes. GLM Lite is $18 against $20 for Claude Pro, and GLM Max is $168 against $200 for Claude Max 20x (Max 5x is $100). Whether it is cheaper in practice depends on how much of your time goes into fixing its output.
Does the GLM Coding Plan work with Claude Code?
Yes. Point Claude Code at Z.ai’s endpoint with the settings file above. Z.ai also documents setups for Cline, OpenCode, Kilo Code and its own ZCode.
Where this comes from
I run eight products solo and my back office runs on Claude Code schedules, so I have used the GLM Coding Plan and Claude Code on real work, not demos. I paid for the GLM plan on its top tier while testing it and cancelled it, and the verdict above is what I actually pay for this month: a Claude Max 20x seat, two Team seats, a Codex subscription, and a cheap API key for long, simple jobs. When I hand a whole feature to Claude Code, the brief is one I dictate rather than type, through Contextli, the dictation app I built so the model gets the context on my screen along with my words. If you take one thing from this piece, run the one-week trial before you prepay anything, and judge on the minutes you spend fixing output, not on the monthly bill.