Event Published Models and productsZhipu AI
Zhipu's half price GLM-5.3-Flash promotion ends on 9 September
Zhipu AI's discounted GLM-5.3-Flash price expires after 9 September, when its input, cached input and output rates each double to the printed list prices.
What happened
Published here
Zhipu AI's international pricing page sells GLM-5.3-Flash at $0.075 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens, and states that this is a 50% discount off list prices of $0.15 and $0.50, with cached input at $0.015 against a list price of $0.03 and cached input storage described as "Limited-time Free". The page puts the end of the promotion at "24:00 on September 9, 2026 (UTC+8, Singapore time)". We read it on 5 September 2026. (Zhipu GLM pricing on the international platform, read 5 September 2026)
US dollars per 1M input tokens
Data: our Zhipu API price tableverified Chart: AI Journey
The numbers
Input now, per million tokens
$0.075
The promotional rate, which the vendor prints beside a struck-through list price.
Input from 10 September
$0.15
The list price, reached when the promotion closes at 24:00 on 9 September.
Output now, per million tokens
$0.25
The half of the bill that usually decides it.
Output from 10 September
$0.50
Both ends of the bill double on the same day.
Read from Zhipu GLM pricing on the international platform, read 5 September 2026
Tracked on this site: our Zhipu API price table
What it means for you
That is not enough notice to move a workload, so the useful thing to know is what the price becomes rather than what it is. From 10 September the model costs twice as much per token on input, on cached input and on output alike. Free storage on cached input is not part of that deadline: the page marks it "Limited-time Free" without naming an end date, and prints the same words on models that carry no discount at all. If you are comparing Chinese platform prices against an American vendor this week, compare against the list price, because the discount will be gone before most procurement conversations finish. Our row records the discounted figure as the current price and the vendor's own wording about the deadline in the note.
In more detail
The reason this item exists at all is that a promotion with a deadline is the one kind of price change you can report before it happens. Everything else in this log is written after the fact, from a page that has already moved. Here the vendor has printed the date, so the change is knowable in advance and worth saying out loud while there is still time to act on it.
It is also a reminder about how the cheap end of this market advertises itself. A headline price that is half of a list price is a real price for four more days, and a comparison table built from it will be wrong on 10 September without anybody editing anything. Our row keeps both numbers so the table here can be corrected against a date rather than against a memory.
Sources
Sources read
Zhipu GLM pricing on the international platform, read 5 September 2026 (docs.z.ai)
Pricing read
our own Zhipu price table, where the row and its deadline note live (aijourney.space)
Own ledger read
Cite this
AI Journey, "Zhipu's half price GLM-5.3-Flash promotion ends on 9 September", 6 Sep 2026, https://aijourney.space/updates/2026-09-06-zhipu-glm-5-3-flash-discount-ends/ (source: Zhipu AI, verified 6 Sep 2026)
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