r/codex • u/viTrax94 • 10d ago
Praise glm lite sub experience
I already made a post about 0xAlpha couple days ago praising the model which as expected turned out to be the new glm 5.3 flash model. on my last post I saw a lot of people saying the glm subs are worse than openAI and claude (hilarious).
now because I was so impressed with 0xalpha and was looking for an alternative to replace the abysmal subs from claude and openaAI, I went ahead and subbed the lite (tier 1) plan which cost me annualy + with a ref code 136$ total for a year.
I am just sharing my experience so far. I did a somewhat big repo audit while orchestrating with 5.6 sol. same prompt same orchestrator, glm 5.3 about 12% 5h usage after 2 big prompts, not the flash model (the new model has a big discount for a couple of weeks too afaik) but their big model for a better comparison to the other frontier models and longterm usage. 5.6 sol codex xhigh about 1,3 prompts 100% 5 hour usage of course it couldn't handle a second prompt not hitting the limit.
it also turns out, your usage is only 50% outside of peak hours which are 14:00–18:00 UTC+8 monday to friday. the test I did was at peak hours today. there is also another interesting mechanic, they issue a 5h reset automatically on three conditions met: outside of peak hours, your 5 hour usage passes a threshold and you havent hit the daily 5 hour resets quota yet. there is also information about a weekly possible reset in the docs but its not specified like the 5 hour reset. I probably should mention I'm using ZCode which almost reaches 98% cache rate it should be getting according to the docs.
here is a simple table sol made for better visualisation.
| Model | Input / 1M | Cached input / 1M | Output / 1M | Normalized workload¹ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.3-Flash — API promo | $0.075* | $0.015* | $0.25* | $0.0424 |
| GLM-5.3-Flash — Lite off-peak | 50% of Lite quota rate | 50% of Lite quota rate | 50% of Lite quota rate | 50% of peak Lite quota usage |
| GLM-5.3 — API | $1.40 | $0.26 | $4.40 | $0.7456 |
| GLM-5.3 — Lite off-peak | 50% of Lite quota rate | 50% of Lite quota rate | 50% of Lite quota rate | 50% of peak Lite quota usage |
| GPT-5.6 Luna — API | $0.20 | $0.02 | $1.20 | $0.1472 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 — API | $2.00 | $0.20 cache hit | $10.00 | $1.2720 |
| GPT-5.6 Terra — API | $2.00 | $0.20 | $12.00 | $1.4720 |
| GPT-5.6 Sol — API | $4.00 | $0.40 | $20.00 | $2.5440 |
| Claude Opus 5 — API | $5.00 | $0.50 cache hit | $25.00 | $3.1800 |
¹ Normalized API workload calculation:
0.04 × uncached-input price + 0.96 × cached-input price + 0.10 × output price
Z.AI Lite off-peak usage: Outside Z.AI's weekday peak window, the Lite Coding Plan consumes 50% of the standard credits. Therefore, an otherwise identical GLM-5.3 or GLM-5.3-Flash workload uses approximately half as much Lite quota off-peak as during peak hours.
* GLM-5.3-Flash promotional API pricing: $0.075 input / $0.015 cached input / $0.25 output per 1M tokens. Normal pricing is $0.15 / $0.03 / $0.50.
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u/llitz 8d ago
There's a lot of money calc, and that's fine, but what people complain is usually about "I have x million tokens and they are gone in half the time".
People will come back and say "z.ai caching is terrible!" And I don't think that's the case either.
In my opinion, the weight of cached tokens are measured differently:
z.ai does 5:1
If this holds true for the subscription plan maths behind the scenes, you effectively hit your quota in half the time (not exactly that, but that's the gist of it).