GLM-5.3 Coding Plan Provider for Claude Code

GLM-5.3 is a frontier reasoning model available through z.ai’s Coding Plan. It exposes a native Anthropic-compatible endpoint, so Claude Code talks to it without adapters or middleware.

Model specs

The older glm-5.2 and glm-5.1 ids are no longer served on the Coding Plan endpoint. Requests for them are automatically routed to glm-5.3, so existing configs keep working, but the ids are effectively deprecated.

Thinking is always on: GLM-5.3 rejects requests that disable it, and supports reasoning_effort values of low, high, and max. The template sets REASONING_EFFORT to high and allocates 8,000 thinking tokens, which is enough for most code tasks without consuming much of the context window.

Context windows differ across tiers, so the template sets them per model rather than through a single global override. GLM-5.3 carries a [1m] suffix that tells Claude Code its real 1M window in the opus and sonnet slots, and Claude Code’s default 200K assumption for unrecognized models already matches GLM-5-Turbo exactly. Auto-compaction therefore triggers at the right point for every tier, with no CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW override required.

Setup

1. Get a Coding Plan subscription at z.ai
2. Copy your API key from the dashboard
3. Run the setup command:

claude-multi add glm

4. Paste your API key when prompted

The template handles the base URL, model mappings, context limits, and thinking parameters.

When to pick GLM

GLM-5.3 is a good fit when you want a fixed monthly cost instead of per-token billing. GLM-5-Turbo handles the light work (quick edits, shell commands, subagent calls) while GLM-5.3 takes heavier refactoring and long agentic runs, all inside the same quota.

If your workload is bursty and you prefer paying only for what you use, look at the DeepSeek or MiMo pay-per-token templates instead.

Pricing details

GLM reaches Claude Code through Z.ai’s Coding Plan, a monthly subscription. The Anthropic-compatible endpoint is gated to the plan; there is no pay-per-token Anthropic URL for GLM, and GLM-5.3 is Coding Plan-only at launch with general pay-as-you-go API access coming soon.

Usage is metered in credits: (input x input_mult + cached_input x cached_mult + output x output_mult) / 10,000, with multipliers per model:

Off-peak requests count at 50% of the standard credit rate. Peak is only Monday-Friday 14:00-18:00 UTC+8, so nights, weekends, and weekday mornings all bill at the off-peak rate.

Plans start from $18 USD/month for Lite, with 20% off quarterly and 30% off yearly billing. This points system replaced the older peak/off-peak multiplier plan, which was discontinued for new users on 2026-07-30. GLM-5-Turbo is also on the standard pay-as-you-go API, but that route isn’t Anthropic-compatible, so claude-multi doesn’t use it. For benchmarks and a full breakdown of the plan, see the GLM-5.3 announcement post. The GLM-5.2 post covers how the plan looked at launch, and z.ai has current Pro and Max pricing.

Related providers

• DeepSeek - pay-per-token, also frontier coding
• MiniMax - 1M context window, subscription
• Qwen - Alibaba’s coder models, pay-per-token