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Public story · 2026-08-16 · high
Z.ai's new coding plans cost $18 a month, about a tenth of typical US frontier prices, while DeepSeek raised its own.
Why now: Z.ai's launch on August 14 and DeepSeek's price hike two days later landed close enough to force a real choice between billing models.
Z.ai shipped GLM-5.3 on August 14, priced as a monthly coding subscription instead of per-token, per Decrypt.
The shift matters because it changes the cost lever for every company building AI coding tools on top of these models. A flat seat and a metered token both scale differently once usage grows past a light user.
The three tiers cost $18, $72, and $160 a month, about a tenth of typical US frontier API pricing. Z.ai built GLM-5.3 on the same 743B base as GLM-5.2. The gains came from post-training alone, pushing Terminal-Bench 3.0 from 4.6 to 28.3 and DeepSWE v1.1 from 46.2 to 66.9.
The open weights aren't out yet. Z.ai is holding them behind a safety review over cyber-offense capability, and Decrypt's report doesn't list a per-token API rate.
Two days later, DeepSeek moved the opposite direction. It hiked metered token prices and added peak and off-peak tiers.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
DeepSeek competes with Anthropic / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek competes with Anthropic); both cover August, Bench, DeepSeek, Terminal; overlapping topics (model, token).
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek competes with Anthropic); both cover Bench, DeepSeek, GLM, Terminal; overlapping topics (coding, model).
DeepSeek released V4-Flash / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek released V4-Flash); both cover August, DeepSeek, DeepSWE; overlapping topics (cost, model).
DeepSeek competes with Anthropic / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek competes with Anthropic); both cover Bench, Terminal; overlapping topics (capability, coding, model).
DeepSeek partners with Huawei / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek partners with Huawei); both cover Bench, DeepSeek; overlapping topics (cost, model, token).
DeepSeek competes with Anthropic / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek competes with Anthropic); both cover DeepSeek, GLM; overlapping topics (coding, model).
DeepSeek competes with Anthropic / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek competes with Anthropic); both cover DeepSeek, GLM; overlapping topics (cost, model, token).
DeepSeek competes with Anthropic / Shared entities / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (DeepSeek competes with Anthropic); both cover Bench, GLM, Terminal; earlier Bench coverage from 2026-06-26.