GLM-5.2 API Pricing & Cost Calculator

GLM-5.2 is the value workhorse of the Chinese frontier labs. Excellent output pricing ($4.40 per million) and a real 1M context window make it a strong pick for high-volume agentic and document workloads.

GLM-5.2 is Z.ai's (Zhipu) frontier model, offering a 1-million-token context window at prices competitive with Gemini 3.6 Flash and below most US frontier peers.

By TechCompare · Updated

Input tokens
100,000
50% cached
Output tokens
5,000
per request
Volume
100 / monthly
Standard API

Calculator

Cost Comparison

Based on 100,000 input tokens (50% cached), 5,000 output tokens, and 100 requests.

How this is calculated

GLM-5.2 is priced at $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens on Z.ai's official list, with an ~81% prompt caching discount ($0.26 per million cached reads). That puts it cheaper than Gemini 3.6 Flash ($1.50/$7.50) on both axes and below GPT-5.6 Terra's list price on input.

Verdict

GLM-5.2 is the value workhorse of the Chinese frontier labs. Excellent output pricing ($4.40 per million) and a real 1M context window make it a strong pick for high-volume agentic and document workloads.

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Frequently asked questions

How does GLM-5.2 compare to Gemini 3.6 Flash on price?
GLM-5.2 is cheaper on both input ($1.40 vs $1.50 per million) and output ($4.40 vs $7.50 per million). Gemini 3.6 Flash has a stronger cache discount (90% vs ~81%), so the gap narrows for cache-heavy workloads.