The fact is, you wouldn’t be okay with the real prices as well. All indications point to opus not being subsidised but having huge margins.

GLM 5.2 is not subsidised - it is an Opus tier model that costs a small fraction. I doubt you would be okay and all problems would suddenly vanish.

GLM 5.2 isn't quite modern Opus tier, as seen in this comparison where Opus 4.5 scores 4/5 on some coding tasks where GLM 5.2 scores 0/5: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models But yes, GLM 5.2 is cheap.

But the real standout on price is DeepSeek V4 Flash, which competes, more or less, with models in between Sonnet and Haiku. From third-party providers, it costs around $0.09/M, $0.18/M out, compared to $3M/in, $15M/out for Sonnet and $1M/in, $5M/out for Haiku. To get the price of DSv4 (Flash and Pro) so low, DeepSeek did a lot of innovative optimization work that will likely show up in other open weight models in the future.