text model comparison
GLM-5.2 Air vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
GLM-5.2 Air is cheaper on input ($0.17/M against $0.28/M) and DeepSeek V4 Pro is cheaper on output ($0.55/M against $0.62/M), so which one costs less is decided by the shape of the work rather than by either rate on its own: the two bills cross at 1.57 output tokens per input token, and at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month — 0.20 output tokens per input — GLM-5.2 Air comes to $29.40 against DeepSeek V4 Pro's $39.00. GLM-5.2 Air is catalogued but not currently servable — a request naming `z-ai/glm-5.2-air` returns `no available channel` — so its figure is what it will cost once an upstream carries it, while DeepSeek V4 Pro can be called today at the rate above.
GLM-5.2 Air is not available yet. No configured upstream serves GLM-5.2 Air, so a request returns no available channel. The rates below are what it will cost once an upstream carries it, not something you can spend today. DeepSeek V4 Pro can be called now.
Side by side
| GLM-5.2 Air | DeepSeek V4 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Our rate — input | $0.17/M | $0.28/M |
| Our rate — output | $0.62/M | $0.55/M |
| Our rate — cached input | $0.034/M | $0.055/M |
| Official rate — input | $0.28/M | $0.43/M |
| Official rate — output | $1.10/M | $0.87/M |
| Below official | 43% | 37% |
| Context window | 128K | 160K |
| Publisher | Z.ai | DeepSeek |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| Released | Jul 8, 2026 | May 21, 2026 |
| Model id | z-ai/glm-5.2-air | deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro |
| Callable today | No | Yes |
What it costs, at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month
One volume, both models, this catalogue’s published rates. Your figure will differ; the arithmetic will not, and the ratio of the two columns is the part that transfers to your own numbers.
| Model | At our rates | At official rates |
|---|---|---|
| GLM-5.2 AirNot servable | $29.40 | $50.00 |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro | $39.00 | $60.90 |
At this volume GLM-5.2 Air is $9.60 cheaper than DeepSeek V4 Pro — 25% less. That ordering holds only below 1.57 output tokens per input token; above it the two swap places.
Excludes cached-input savings, which on a repeated-prefix workload reduce the input side substantially. Cached rates are in the table above and on the pricing page.
When to pick each
Pick GLM-5.2 AirNot servable
- It is not callable today — no configured upstream serves it, so the rate above is what it will cost rather than what you can spend.
- Input costs $0.17/M against DeepSeek V4 Pro's $0.28/M, which decides the bill on input-heavy work — long documents in, short answers out.
- Cached input is $0.034/M against DeepSeek V4 Pro's $0.055/M, and on an agent loop the repeated prefix is most of every request.
- The catalogue lists it for high-throughput classification and extraction, cheap router/planner step in front of a larger model and real-time chat where latency beats depth.
Pick DeepSeek V4 Pro
- Output costs $0.55/M against GLM-5.2 Air's $0.62/M, which is the whole bill on generation-heavy work where a short brief produces long copy.
- It holds 160K in one request against 128K — 1.3× wider, which decides whether a long input is one call or a map-reduce.
- It is callable today. GLM-5.2 Air is catalogued but not currently served by any upstream.
- The catalogue lists it for cost-sensitive batch processing at scale, math and reasoning-heavy evaluation pipelines and agent loops with large repeated system prompts.
Every line above is a field in the model catalogue rather than a judgement about output quality. This site publishes no benchmark results, so which model answers your prompts better is a measurement to run on your own traffic — the same key calls both.
Questions
- Which is cheaper, GLM-5.2 Air or DeepSeek V4 Pro?
- Neither, unconditionally — and any page that answers this with one name is answering a different question. GLM-5.2 Air has the lower input rate and DeepSeek V4 Pro the lower output rate, so the two bills cross at 1.57 output tokens per input token. At the 100M input and 20M output tokens a month worked above, which is 0.20 output tokens per input, GLM-5.2 Air is the cheaper of the two at $29.40 against $39.00.
- Can I call both GLM-5.2 Air and DeepSeek V4 Pro today?
- Only DeepSeek V4 Pro. A request naming `deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro` reaches a live upstream and is billed at the rate above; `z-ai/glm-5.2-air` returns `no available channel`, because no configured upstream carries GLM-5.2 Air yet. Its rate is published because it is what the model will cost, not because you can spend it today. 7 of the 24 models in this catalogue are callable right now; the rest are listed at their intended price and marked, so you find out here rather than from an error at call time.
- How much context does GLM-5.2 Air hold compared with DeepSeek V4 Pro?
- DeepSeek V4 Pro takes 163,840 tokens (160K) in a single request against GLM-5.2 Air's 131,072 (128K) — 1.3× wider. The window is a cost decision before it is a capability one: an input that does not fit has to be split, summarised in pieces and summarised again, which bills the source text more than once. Below that line the wider window is capacity you are not using.
- What licences are GLM-5.2 Air and DeepSeek V4 Pro under?
- Both are MIT — GLM-5.2 Air from Z.ai and DeepSeek V4 Pro from DeepSeek. Licence is therefore not a differentiator on this pairing, which is worth knowing before it becomes the question a legal review opens with. Read the text itself before shipping either; a licence name is a pointer to terms, not a summary of them.
- How do I switch between GLM-5.2 Air and DeepSeek V4 Pro?
- Change the model id and nothing else. Both are served from `https://router.xark.io/api/v1` behind the same OpenAI-compatible contract — `z-ai/glm-5.2-air` and `deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro` — so the request shape, the streaming frames, the usage block and the error envelope are identical between them. Send an explicit id and no substitution happens underneath you, which is what makes running both and comparing the two on your own traffic a change of one string rather than a migration. GLM-5.2 Air is not servable yet, so that swap is not available today.
- At what workload does DeepSeek V4 Pro become the cheaper of the two?
- Above 1.57 output tokens for every input token. GLM-5.2 Air charges $0.17/M on input and $0.62/M on output; DeepSeek V4 Pro charges $0.28/M and $0.55/M. Setting the two bills equal gives that ratio, so anything below it — summarisation, extraction, retrieval, agent loops — is cheaper on GLM-5.2 Air, and anything above it, which in practice means long-form generation, is cheaper on DeepSeek V4 Pro. Measure the ratio on your own traffic; it is the only input this decision needs.
- How do these rates compare with the official ones?
- Both rows are published side by side rather than as a single discount claim. GLM-5.2 Air is 43% below Z.ai's official rate and DeepSeek V4 Pro is 37% below DeepSeek's, which at 100M input and 20M output tokens a month is $29.40 against an official $50.00 for GLM-5.2 Air, and $39.00 against $60.90 for DeepSeek V4 Pro. The claim on this site is only that our rate sits below the model publisher's own — not that no one else is cheaper. Where a third-party provider undercuts us on either model, that provider's rate is printed on that model's own page.