Is GLM 4.6V a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats GLM 4.6V 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 144 · Oct 16, 2026
As of Oct 16, 2026, GLM 4.6V is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 94.7 higher and costs 47% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 144 rated, priced standard models are undominated. GLM 5.3 Flash: Price under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than GLM 4.6V: 94.7 points higher on LMArena and 47% less per million tokens, $0.213 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1376.3
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.450/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.238/M
Price under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026GLM 4.6V takes image, text, video, returns up to 32,768 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.
Compared against 144 rated, priced models on this lens: 5 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. GLM 4.6V scores 1376.3 at $0.450 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 | 1471.0 +94.7 | $0.238/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026 | 47% |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1455.2 +78.9 | $0.168/M | 63% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1433.9 +57.6 | $0.128/M | 72% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.8 +51.5 | $0.175/M | 61% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.2 +20.9 | $0.114/M | 75% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 | $0.182/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026 | video |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1442.9 | $0.205/M | max output |
| Hy3 | 1437.4 | $0.231/M | image, video |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1432.2 | $0.113/MPrice under confirmation since Oct 12, 2026 | image, video |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.5 | $0.290/M | image, video |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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