I'm on their pro plan and I respectfully disagree - it's genuinely excellent with GLM 5.1 so long as you remember to /compact once it hits around 100k tokens. At that point it's pretty much broken and entirely unusable, but if you keep context under about 100k it's genuinely on par with Opus for me, and in some ways it's arguably better.

I am on the mid tier Coding plan to trying it out for the sake of curiosity.

During off peak hour a simple 3 line CSS change took over 50 minutes and it routinely times out mid-tool and leaves dangling XML and tool uses everywhere, overwriting files badly or patching duplicate lines into files

My impression is that different users get vastly different service, possibly based on location. I live in Western Europe, and it works perfectly for me. Never had a single timeout or noticeable quality degradation. My brother lives in East Asia, and it's unusable for him. Some days, it just literally does not work, no API calls are successful. Other days, it's slow or seems dumber than it should be.

Every model seems that way, going back to even GPT 3 and 4, the company comes out with a very impressive model that then regresses over a few months as the company tries to rein in inference costs through quantization and other methods.

This is surprising to me. Maybe because I'm on Pro, and not Lite. I signed up last week and managed to get a ton of good work done with 5.1. I think I did run into the odd quantization quirk, but overall: $30 well spent

I'm also on the lite plan and have been using 5.1 for a few days now. It works fine for me.

But it's all casual side projects.

Edit: I often to /compact at around 100 000 token or switch to a new session. Maybe that is why.

I'm on their lite plan as well and I've been using it for my OpenClaw. It had some issues but it also one-shotted a very impressive dashboard for my Twitter bookmarks.

For the price this is a pretty damn impressive model.

Is there any advantage to their fixed payment plans at all vs just using this model via 3rd party providers via openrouter, given how relatively cheap they tend to be on a per-token basis?

Providers like DeepInfra are already giving access to 5.1 https://deepinfra.com/zai-org/GLM-5.1

$1.40 in $4.40 out $0.26 cached

/ 1M tokens

That's more expensive than other models, but not terrible, and will go down over time, and is far far cheaper than Opus or Sonnet or GPT.

I haven't had any bad luck with DeepInfra in particular with quantization or rate limiting. But I've only heard bad things about people who used z.ai directly.

I'm on their Lite plan and I see some of this too. It is also slow. I use it as a backup.

> Obvious quantization issues

Devil's advocate: why shouldn't they do it if OpenAI, Anthropic and Google get away with playing this game?

It has been useless for long time when compared to Opus or even something like Kimi. The saving grace was that it was dirt cheap but that doesn't matter if it can't do what I want even after many repeated tries and trying to push it to a correct solution.