Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch)
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$23.25
$73.75
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 saves $50.50
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$24.00
$74.00
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 saves $50.00
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$25.20
$78.00
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 saves $52.80
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$15.60
$48.00
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 saves $32.40
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$8.10
$24.50
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 saves $16.40
Capabilities side by side
Capability
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch)
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
✓ Yes
—
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
—
—
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
—
—
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
✓ Yes
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
cost matters at scale — it is 69% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($23.25 vs $73.75 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need image input — to read screenshots, charts and scanned pages; Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) does not advertise it
you need log-probabilities — to read token confidence for classification and scoring; Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 393K tokens (about 294,900 words) per response
Choose Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) if…
No advantage on the data we track — pick it for provider preference or output quality on your own prompts.
Frequently asked questions
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 better than Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch)?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 comes out ahead on the data we track: 4 advantages and none for Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch).
Which is cheaper, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch)?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is cheaper: $0.26 vs $0.84 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 69% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $23.25 against $73.75.
How much do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) cost per million tokens?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 costs $0.15 per 1M input tokens and $0.60 per 1M output tokens; Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) costs $0.45 input and $2.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch)?
Both take 1.0M tokens per request — roughly 1,573 pages of text.
Do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) support function calling and JSON output?
Can DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) read images?
Only DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 accepts image input; Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) is text-only for input.
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch)?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 can write up to 393K tokens (about 294,900 words) per response; Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
When were DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) released?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 was listed on 2026-10-17; Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) on 2026-08-18.
Has the price of DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 or Z.ai: GLM 5.3 (batch) changed?
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is the October 17, 2026 snapshot of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, served by DeepSeek under the `deepseek-flash` API model name. V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model...
GLM-5.3 is a large-scale reasoning model from Z.ai, built for complex software engineering and long-horizon agent tasks. It supports text input and output with a 1M-token context window, and improves...