I Spent $200 on Claude Last Month. Then I Found GLM-4.6

My Claude bill hit $200 last month.

Not because I was careless. Not because I was wasting tokens on casual conversations. I was doing what every embedded systems engineer does now — letting AI help me write firmware, debug CAN protocol implementations, and architect Qt applications faster.

But $200 a month? That’s $2,400 a year. For a freelancer juggling Fiverr gigs and personal projects, that’s real money.

Then on September 29, 2025, Z.ai quietly dropped GLM-4.6. And everything changed.

The Numbers That Made Me Stop Scrolling

82.8 on LiveCodeBench versus Claude’s similar performance.

200,000 token context window — enough to feed it an entire embedded Linux codebase in one go.

$0.60 per million input tokens. Compare that to Claude’s pricing.

I read those specs three times. This couldn’t be real. A 355-billion parameter Mixture of Experts model delivering Claude-level performance at one-seventh the cost?

I had to test it myself.