Technical Research Brief • Dataset verified 2026-10-17

Chinese Coding Plans and APIs: GLM, Qwen, DeepSeek and Kimi

The strongest price competition in coding models now comes from Chinese labs. Z.ai sells flat GLM Coding Plans from $18/month, Alibaba sells a Qwen Coding Plan Pro at $50/month, and DeepSeek pairs extremely low API rates with a weekday peak schedule. This brief lays out the current published prices and the peak-hour arithmetic.

DeepSeek V4.1 cache hit

$0.003 / M

Off-peak; $0.006 during weekday peak

GLM Coding Lite

$18/mo

$12.60/mo billed annually

Qwen Coding Pro

$50/mo

~90K requests/month on Model Studio

Current Chinese coding plans

Sources checked 2026-10-17

Plan	Monthly	Annual / mo	Included usage
GLM Coding Lite Z.ai	$18/mo	$12.6/mo	2,000 credits/5h; 10,000 credits/week
GLM Coding Pro Z.ai	$80/mo	$56/mo	12,000 credits/5h; 60,000 credits/week
GLM Coding Max Z.ai	$168/mo	$117.6/mo	28,000 credits/5h; 140,000 credits/week
Qwen Coding Plan Pro Alibaba Cloud	$50/mo	—	~90,000 requests/mo; 6,000 requests per 5-hour window
ClinePass Cline	$9.99/mo	—	2-5x standard API rate limits on curated open-weight models
Command Code GOAT Command Code	$10/mo	—	$80 in credits; ~75K requests; $60 on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

API prices and the DeepSeek peak schedule

USD per million tokens

Model	Off-peak input	Off-peak cache	Off-peak output	Peak input	Peak output
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash	$0.15	$0.003	$0.60	$0.30	$1.20
DeepSeek V4 Pro	$0.66	$0.022	$1.98	$1.32	$3.96
GLM-5.3 (OpenRouter)	$0.079	—	$4.80	—	—
Qwen3.8 Max (OpenRouter)	$2.00	$0.25	$6.00	—	—
Kimi K3 (OpenRouter)	$0.304	$0.21	$11.936	—	—

The peak schedule is the new scheduling problem

DeepSeek charges peak rates on weekdays from 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC, and 50% off at all other times, including the entire weekend and Chinese public holidays. A US East Coast developer's standard working day is fully inside the off-peak window; a European afternoon partly overlaps it; an Asian working day straddles both.

The /now router converts the schedule to the visitor's local timezone and shows a countdown to the next transition, with the machine-readable version at /data/schedules.json.

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