As of August 25, 2026, GLM-4.5-Air is 65% cheaper per million tokens than Kimi K2.5. GLM-4.5-Air is $0.20 / $1.10 per million input/output tokens versus Kimi K2.5 at $0.59 / $3.09. Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat
Sources: Z AI pricing (https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing); Moonshot AI pricing (https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat)
GLM-4.5-Air
Z AI
Input
$0.20
Output
$1.10
Kimi K2.5
Moonshot AI
Input
$0.59
Output
$3.09
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
SWE-bench Verified. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
GLM-4.5-AirKimi K2.5Verdict
GLM-4.5-Air offers significantly lower pricing, while Kimi K2.5 leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 25, 2026, GLM-4.5-Air is 65% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. GLM-4.5-Air costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.10 per million output tokens ($1.30 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Kimi K2.5 costs $0.59 / $3.09 per million tokens ($3.68 blended). Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
GLM-4.5-Air Z AI API pricing is $0.20 input and $1.10 output per million tokens via Z AI. Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI API pricing is $0.59 input and $3.09 output per million tokens via Moonshot AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Kimi K2.5 leads on SWE-bench Verified: GLM-4.5-Air at 57.6% vs Kimi K2.5 at 76.8%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
GLM-4.5-Air supports a 131K token context window, while Kimi K2.5 supports 262K tokens. Kimi K2.5 offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Kimi K2.5 leads on 7 of 7 shared benchmarks versus GLM-4.5-Air's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both GLM-4.5-Air and Kimi K2.5 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, GLM-4.5-Air has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call GLM-4.5-Air through Z AI and Kimi K2.5 through Moonshot AI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published Z AI API pricing and Moonshot AI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://platform.kimi.com/docs/pricing/chat. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
GLM-4.5-Air supports up to an unspecified number of output tokens per request, while Kimi K2.5 supports up to 262K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Neither GLM-4.5-Air nor Kimi K2.5 has published throughput data on this page yet. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open GLM-4.5-Air or Kimi K2.5 from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. GLM-4.5-Air costs $0.20/M input and $1.10/M output. Kimi K2.5 costs $0.59/M input and $3.09/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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