Well I tried the $20/mo tier and used GLM specifically and did maybe 3-4 hours of work and I'm already through 50% of my monthly tier and blew through my time limited quota twice. I won't renew for another month.

Which I think only underscores my point that actually the GLM models are not very cost effective.

They essentially cost the same as the SOTA models from OpenAI and Anthropic, while not being quite as smart. I could have gotten about the same amount of work done on the $20 Codex plan. And I had to use my $100 Codex plan to finish the work GLM started before it ran out of quota. And also to fix it since GLM left a bit of a mess.

I like that GLM exists. Other Chinese models are far more cost effective. GLM is expensive, even on a fixed plan.

Ollama can’t meaningfully subsidize their subscriptions - there is no business case to do so because they are a commodity host. If you want to compare subsidized subscription value you would need to compare with z.ai’s plans. One problem with any comparison is that they are all very opaque in terms of usage and the plans change a lot over time. I got on pro at $30 a month so it’s a very good value - compared to $20 Claude/Codex plans I get at least 10x the usage and I use all 3 regularly. At today’s prices Codex pro ($100) is likely a better value.

But if you are building a product or in an enterprise environment where you essentially have to pay API rates then GLM is the best value hands down.