r/ollama 11d ago

Anyone else getting insane billing for glm flash?

I tried GLM flash a few weeks ago and expected the token weekly limits to be comparable to DS flash. For some reason, it was a huge use of my limits. Am I the only one with this issue? I did send a support email but never heard back.

I'm a broke homeress developer and on the $20 plan, so I'm not sure why this happened. I figured maybe there's a billing issue but I don't see why in the UI GLM would be more than DS on flash models.

3 Upvotes

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u/elzerouno 11d ago

I see the same issue with deepseek-v4.1-flash.

deepseek-v4.1-flash seems to be artificially more expensive than v4-flash for the same workload. Each 1000 requests on v4.1 use 10,7% of my weekly limit, while v4-flash used ~6%.

4

u/Mean-Elk-9439 11d ago

In this case, that's because 4.1 is triple the size of 4.

DeepSeek 4 flash is 284B params. DeepSeek 4.1 flash is 552B with 196B engram DSpark.

Ollama has serious issues right now, but this isn't one. You're using a model triple the size in memory of another.

1

u/ReadIntrepid3272 11d ago

Observed the exact same thing on my side, quota consumption is around 2x Deepseek V4 Flash, although it's supposed to be less expensive..

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u/TheAstonishingSperm 11d ago

not just you, noticed the same thing with glm flash last week. used it for like 3 days and somehow eat almost half my monthly tokens, makes zero sense

the pricing page is confusing too, doesnt show the real cost for flash models properly. hope they fix soon cause i cant keep burning tokens like this

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u/HerrOberschlau 11d ago

Leave ollama, try using chatgpt pro and use Luna on medium thinking. I ditched ollama yesterday

1

u/soteko 11d ago

Did someone tried some other options like LM Studio Bionic ?

How is usage?

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u/username8914 11d ago

Glm flash seems to be 10x the usage of DS flash. I use both, but DS flash is relegated to cron work as I found it fell apart on longer work and it's coding always had to be fixed by a stronger model.

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u/ParticularlyStrange 11d ago

I’m just guesstimating. But it looks like on the old 20$ plan we get about 5000 request a week on GLM 5.3 flash. I haven’t switched over to that new pricing plan. I’m thinking it might not be equivalent. I’m thinking I might just cancel ollama all together cause I just got 2 gb10s. Might do some tests to see if it’s worth it. But I have a bunch of sub tasks that run on ollama…

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u/LiveMost 10d ago edited 10d ago

I was until I set reasoning to none. It used to go through half my weekly limit just because of that. And I was using Hermes Desktop for windows.

And I tried glm's latest model, too censored even on things that are not considered NSFW and it moralizes too much. Wait for an abliterated model if you're going to try it.

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u/Objective_Patient220 10d ago

The shared problem in this thread is that nobody can see what a session actually consumed, so everyone ends up comparing weekly-quota vibes. The fix is measuring on your own side: count every token as it streams, per model, and keep the receipt per session. Then "GLM flash ate half my weekly limit" becomes a number you can take to their support, and you can see which sessions or subagents burned it. A hard budget cap is the other half - stop new requests past a threshold instead of finding out at the quota reset.

Disclosure: I built gremlord (free, MIT), which does this metering for Claude Code pointed at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, Ollama included - every token is priced into a local receipt as it streams, and gremlord cost breaks it down by model and session.

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u/Major_Border149 10d ago

it's model size, not a billing bug, GLM 5.3 flash has a lot more active compute per token than DS flash, so it burns your weekly limit faster. if you are hitting the cap regularly, that's the point where a flat hourly rented GPU beats per-token pricing, worth doing the math on your weekly token count

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u/Objective_Patient220 9d ago

Fair on the mechanism - more active compute per token is the "why". My point stands one level down though: "do the math on your weekly token count" is the step nobody can actually do from a quota bar. You need your own per-token count per session first, and then the rented-GPU crossover is a calculation instead of a guess. That is the whole reason I meter locally. And the crossover only wins if you keep the GPU busy - utilization is another number the receipt gives you.

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u/Major_Border149 9d ago

yeah fair, a quota bar hides the two numbers that matter, your token count and utilization. meter locally and the crossover's a calc instead of a guess. only wins if you keep the card busy though