What is GLM-5.3-Flash good for?

Visual coding, office and document work, and long agent tasks, with images and video as input. MIT weights allow commercial self-hosting, at the lower-cost end of Z.AI's lineup.

When is GLM-5.3-Flash not a good fit?

No audio input, and no built-in web search, though a host or your own tool loop can add one. Self-hosting still takes a multi-GPU node: memory follows the full 320B parameters, not the 18B active.

What is the cheapest way to run GLM-5.3-Flash?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Z.AI charges $0.08 in / $0.25 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 8x RTX A6000 at $3,168 a month, which costs the same as about 29B tokens a month on that API.

Can I self-host GLM-5.3-Flash?

Yes. The weights are MIT licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 178 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $3,168 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

Open weights · MIT

GLM-5.3-Flash

Z.AI's natively multimodal 320B-parameter MoE (18B active) under MIT license, with hybrid sparse and linear attention, built for coding and long-horizon agent tasks.

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List price via Z.AI

Input: $0.08 / 1M tokens
Output: $0.25 / 1M tokens

7 providers

Key Specifications

Context window: 1M tokens
Max output: 131K tokens
Released: Aug 2026
Parameters: 320B, 18B active
Inputs: Text, image, video

Capabilities Show details: Reasoning Thinks before it answers, always on or as a switchable mode. Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems. Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON.

Hosted API pricing

Input tokens M Output tokens M

Provider	Input / 1M tokens	Output / 1M tokens	Cached input / 1M	Cost at 10M in + 2M out
Z.AI Creator	$0.08	$0.25	$0.02	$1.30	View
EmpirioLabs AI	$0.08	$0.25		$1.30	View
Novita	$0.08	$0.25	$0.02	$1.30	View
Cloudflare	$0.15	$0.50	$0.03	$2.50	View
DigitalOcean	$0.15	$0.50	$0.03	$2.50	View
Together AI	$0.15	$0.50	$0.03	$2.50	View
Lyceum	$0.20	$0.50		$3.00	View

Heads up: Base-tier, on-demand rates per 1M tokens; cached, batch and long-context tiers excluded. A provider may serve a shorter context or a quantized build than the creator's release. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Estimated cost to self-host

GLM-5.3-Flash needs about 178 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 8× RTX A6000 at about $3,168 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 29B tokens a month on Z.AI's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Single node ≤ 8

Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 1M context)	Cost / mo	Break-even vs API
4-bitINT4 / FP4	178 GB190 GB	8× RTX A6000	$3,168$3,168	29B tokens / mo29B tokens / mo
8-bitFP8 / INT8	322 GB334 GB	8× RTX A6000	$3,168$3,168	29B tokens / mo29B tokens / mo
16-bitFP16 / BF16	642 GB654 GB	8× RTX PRO 6000	$12,672$12,672	117B tokens / mo117B tokens / mo

Estimates based on median on-demand rates for Nvidia GPUs. Memory is weights plus KV cache for one request, using FP8 KV cache where supported and FP16/BF16 otherwise. Break-even assumes a 5:1 input-to-output ratio. No guarantee of runtime support, usable performance, or that a matching quantized build exists. How we estimate costs.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest GLM-5.3-Flash by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Model	Blended / 1M	Input / 1M	Output / 1M	Context	Cutoff	vs GLM-5.3-Flash
Llama 3 8B Meta	$0.0833	$0.05	$0.25	8K	Mar 2023	−23%
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B Alibaba Cloud	$0.0917	$0.06	$0.25	262K		−15%
Llama 3.2 3B Meta	$0.0983	$0.05	$0.34	128K	Dec 2023	−9%
Qwen3-30B-A3B FP8 Alibaba Cloud	$0.0983	$0.05	$0.34	33K		−9%
Ministral 3 3B Mistral	$0.10	$0.10	$0.10	256K		−8%
GLM-5.3-Flash This model Z.AI	$0.1083	$0.08	$0.25	1M
GPT-5 Nano OpenAI	$0.1083	$0.05	$0.40	400K	May 2024	0%
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Alibaba Cloud	$0.1267	$0.06	$0.46	262K		+17%
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Alibaba Cloud	$0.1283	$0.07	$0.42	262K		+18%
Gemma 3 27B Instruct Google Cloud	$0.1333	$0.10	$0.30	128K	Aug 2024	+23%
Gemma 4 26B A4B Google Cloud	$0.1333	$0.10	$0.30	256K	Jan 2025	+23%

Prices are USD per 1M tokens at each model's cheapest listed provider. Blended is the cost of 10M input plus 2M output tokens, spread over the 12M.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is GLM-5.3-Flash good for?: Visual coding, office and document work, and long agent tasks, with images and video as input. MIT weights allow commercial self-hosting, at the lower-cost end of Z.AI's lineup.
When is GLM-5.3-Flash not a good fit?: No audio input, and no built-in web search, though a host or your own tool loop can add one. Self-hosting still takes a multi-GPU node: memory follows the full 320B parameters, not the 18B active.
What is the cheapest way to run GLM-5.3-Flash?: Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Z.AI charges $0.08 in / $0.25 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 8x RTX A6000 at $3,168 a month, which costs the same as about 29B tokens a month on that API.
Can I self-host GLM-5.3-Flash?: Yes. The weights are MIT licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 178 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $3,168 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

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