alt Hacker NewsSure. But OpenAI is the same price. Why would I pay $18/month for z.ai when OpenAI is $20/month?
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Why pay a monthly fee when you can pay for exactly the # of tokens you actually consume?
The API rates are very affordable once you start to optimize for the fact that prepaid tokens seem to massively outperform other kinds of tokens.
I can often do with 1 million tokens what my peers have failed to do with 100 million. For me to spend more than $200/m in prepaid API tokens I'd have to pull a 007 work schedule.
One reason might be request limits. OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus w/Codex ($20/month) provides a worst-case 5-hour-request-limit of 15 for GPT-5.5, 20 for GPT-5.4, 60 for GPT-5.4-Mini. Whereas Z.ai Lite ($18/month) provides a worst-case of ~80 for GLM 5.2 (off-peak; on-peak is 2am-6am New York time). So Z.ai can provide higher limits for a cheaper price. (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...)
the pricing page doesn't seem to call it out anymore, but the claim on z.ai coding plan used to be 3x the usage of the equivalent-price claude plan. whether that's accurate i don't know, but just based on api pricing GLM is way cheaper.
OpenCode Go is $10/month and the limits are much more generous than those or Codex
One big advantage I’ve found — people get attached to models (including me). With open models if you find one that works perfectly for you but the next version doesn’t, you can run the old one forever (or someone will for you)