Z.ai's GLM Coding Plan - Like Claude Code but Cheaper

Recently, we’ve talked about Z.ai’s GLM-4.5 which was performing as well as Anthropic’s Sonnet 4 for coding.

And you can use it in Claude Code.

It seems they’ve recently launched a subscription plan using which you can save a lot of cost and the best thing is you can use it in Claude Code.

You can get started with their $3/mo plan or you can go with $15/mo plan.

I’ve got their $15 plan and it looks pretty decent.

How to use it with Claude Code

Just set these env variables before starting claude code.

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=$YOUR_API_KEY

Make sure to set $YOUR_API_KEY with your z.ai’s API key.

And then run claude

How is it?

I tried to refactor one of my side project - qblog using which I’m writing blog post for this blog.

It codebase is kind of mess. Vibe coded one. So I’m doing initial refactoring and here is the plan it came to organize the UI related files 👇

Disclaimer

It is a Chinese model but who doesn’t train on your data these days 😅

Happy cost-effective AI!