❯ Zhipu Relaunches GLM Coding Plan Subscription, Moves to Credit-Based Billing Starting at ¥118/Month

RELAUNCHZhipu reopened the GLM Coding Plan subscription on July 31, with new plans starting at ¥118 per month. Billing has switched to a fully transparent credit system: input, output, and cache-hit tokens, plus calls to different models and MCP capabilities, are all converted into credits under published rules. From today through August 15, annual and quarterly plans get 30% and 20% off, respectively.

THIRD HIKEAccording to public reports, this is Zhipu’s third price increase this year — the February 12 round alone was already north of 30%. In user terms, the new tier comes in 130% to 260% above the previous one. Zoom out the timeline and it gets starker: 18 months ago, the same company was cutting flagship model prices by 90% in China’s LLM price war. Around the same time, Alibaba Cloud also scrapped its basic plans. The reason for the U-turn isn’t hard to guess — coding subscriptions are one of the few scenarios pulling in real money right now, with heavy users burning tokens in the billions per day; at the old price, every sale was a loss. That’s exactly where the credit system comes in: converting unpredictable token consumption into billable quota.

TWO DIRECTIONSOn the same day, per Artificial Analysis, DeepSeek gave away the weights of a model boasting a 50-point intelligence index for free. The two moves look contradictory, but they point to the same judgment: the model itself is no longer where the money is — what can be charged for is stable quota, toolchains, and service commitments. For domestic developers, the contest ahead is how many real tasks each credit can finish, not the price per million tokens; for Zhipu, the case for the price hike rides entirely on that.

▪ SIGNALOne side is handing out weights for free, the other is more than doubling subscription prices — both companies are betting on the same thing: the money isn’t in the model.