What the GLM family is
Z.ai's GLM models show up both on the vendor's own free tier and on third-party platforms that host the open weights, which is the clearest case in this catalog of the same family costing nothing in two very different ways.
Providers offering GLM on free terms
4 of the 25 providers detailed in this catalog list at least one GLM model. Because Z.ai publishes the weights rather than the service, the model id can be identical across all of them while the free allowance is not.
| Provider | Free access | Published limits | Card | Matching models |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SiliconFlow | Provider free tier | 1000 requests per minute | Not required | THUDM/GLM-4-9B-0414 |
| Z.AI Open Platform | Provider free tier | Selected models priced at zero | Not required | GLM-4.7-Flash, GLM-4.5-Flash |
| Cerebras Inference | Free trial credit | 5 requests per minute | Required | zai-glm-4.7 |
| Chutes | Metered access | Published per paid plan | Not required | zai-org/GLM-5 |
How the free terms actually differ
- SiliconFlow — Rate limits for free models are fixed; paid models are tiered by monthly spend and start at tier L0 with 1,000 RPM and 40,000 TPM.
- Z.AI Open Platform — GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash are listed at $0 for input, cached input and output on the official pricing table, making them free to call rather than merely discounted.
- Cerebras Inference — Free Trial limits are 5 RPM and 30K TPM per model, capped at 1M tokens per hour and 1M tokens per day, for gpt-oss-120b, zai-glm-4.7 and gemma-4-31b.
- Chutes — Chutes prices inference per token and sells subscription plans that bundle a daily quota: Plus at $10/month with a bundled daily quota and 6% off pay-as-you-go rates beyond it, and Pro at $20/month with a larger daily quota and 10% off.
Picking one
2 of these 4 publish a fixed request count; the rest state a tier or a credit balance instead, which means the only honest answer to "how much is free" is the one in their console. 3 take no credit card. 4 answer a cross-origin browser request, so a key for those can be checked from the browser checker with nothing installed.
A model id that matches GLM is not a promise that the free tier includes it. Providers move individual models between paid and free without changing the id, which is why each row links to the provider page carrying that provider's own wording and the date it was read.