Is GLM 4.5 Air a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats GLM 4.5 Air on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
12 undominated of 145 · Oct 6, 2026
As of Oct 6, 2026, GLM 4.5 Air is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 85.7 higher and costs 23% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than GLM 4.5 Air: 85.7 points higher on LMArena and 23% less per million tokens, $0.073 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1383.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.310/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1469.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.238/M
GLM 4.5 Air takes text, returns up to 98,304 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 3 sellers.
Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 9 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. GLM 4.5 Air scores 1383.9 at $0.310 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1469.6 +85.7 | $0.238/M | 23% |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 +78.6 | $0.182/M | 41% |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1456.4 +72.5 | $0.175/M | 44% |
| Hy3 | 1440.7 +56.8 | $0.231/M | 25% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1433.9 +50.0 | $0.127/M | 59% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1432.1 +48.2 | $0.113/M | 64% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.5 +43.6 | $0.175/M | 44% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.4 +38.5 | $0.305/M | 2% |
| GPT-6 Luna | 1391.5 +7.6 | $0.200/M | 35% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 31B | 1443.4 | $0.205/M | max output |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.5 | $0.290/M | max output |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.3 | $0.205/M | max output, reasoning |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | 1417.3 | $0.268/M | reasoning |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.0 | $0.150/M | max output |
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Saved decision references
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
Historical decisions cannot be fully replayed from saved references: past prices, scores and capability evidence are not stored.