They have a vision MCP to make up for the model itself not having the capability natively: https://docs.z.ai/devpack/mcp/vision-mcp-server

I also found their web search to be mostly okay.

Furthermore, in case this is of interest to anyone, if you use their ZCode harness then you get bigger Coding Plan quotas: https://zcode.z.ai/en

Used it for a bit, it sits somewhere between OpenCode Desktop (still new but nice) and Claude Desktop (recent versions are good).

As for GLM 5.2 as a model - with max thinking it’s generally satisfactory, somewhere between Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8, better than DeepSeek V4 Pro for sure.

Pricing wise, the subscription doesn’t seem as good as expected. I spent like 60% of the weekly limits of the Pro (50 USD) plan in one day, only because each 5 hour limit only gave me 20% to spend, otherwise it’d be 80-100%. Not even doing anything crazy, just parallel long form work on 2 projects with about 96% cache rate and at most 3 parallel code review sub-agents.

Their Max (100 USD) subscription would last me the whole week, but so does Anthropic for the same money and so would OpenAI. Off-peak is more palatable but I can’t just twiddle my thumbs at 9 AM to 1 PM local time.

Proper savings would show up with the Max plan and yearly billing, but that’s more of a tough sell.