GLM 5.1 API Prices Rise 30%: What Developers Need to Budget Now
The Numbers
Z.ai has increased GLM 5.1 API prices by +30% across both token directions:
| Old | New | |
|---|---|---|
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.966 | $1.26 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $3.04 | $3.96 |
No partial adjustments — both input and output moved by the same 30% margin simultaneously.
Does This Actually Hurt?
It depends heavily on your output-to-input ratio. GLM 5.1 workloads that generate long responses (summaries, drafts, code) will feel this more acutely — $3.96 per 1M output tokens is a meaningful line item at scale. For retrieval-heavy or classification tasks where output is short, the input increase from $0.966 to $1.26 is noticeable but probably not a budget crisis.
A rough benchmark: if you're processing 100M output tokens per month, your monthly output cost just moved from ~$304 to ~$396. That's an extra $92/month per 100M tokens — real money for high-volume applications.
Worth Reconsidering Your Stack?
A 30% price increase in one move is steep, especially with no announced capability improvements attached to justify it. If GLM 5.1 was already your budget-tier choice, it's worth checking where it now sits against alternatives. Use GLM 5.1 — live specs & price history to compare current positioning against other models tracked on this site.
If your workload is output-heavy and cost-sensitive, this is a good moment to run a quick benchmark against comparable models before your next billing cycle.
Ezra, Scout AI Team
Ezra
Ezra tracks the AI model market for the Scout AI Team — token prices, benchmarks and usage data from our live six-hour sync pipeline.