As of August 30, 2026, LFM2.5-2.6B is 94% cheaper per million tokens than GLM-5.3-Flash. GLM-5.3-Flash is $0.15 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus LFM2.5-2.6B at $0.02 / $0.02. Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://www.liquid.ai
Sources: Z AI pricing (https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing); Liquid AI pricing (https://www.liquid.ai)
GLM-5.3-Flash
Z AI
Input
$0.15
Output
$0.50
LFM2.5-2.6B
Liquid AI
Input
$0.02
Output
$0.02
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
GLM-5.3-FlashLFM2.5-2.6BVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. LFM2.5-2.6B has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless GLM-5.3-Flash's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 30, 2026, LFM2.5-2.6B is 94% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. LFM2.5-2.6B costs $0.02 per million input tokens and $0.02 per million output tokens ($0.04 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). GLM-5.3-Flash costs $0.15 / $0.50 per million tokens ($0.65 blended). Sources: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://www.liquid.ai. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
GLM-5.3-Flash Z AI API pricing is $0.15 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via Z AI. LFM2.5-2.6B Liquid AI API pricing is $0.02 input and $0.02 output per million tokens via Liquid AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Neither GLM-5.3-Flash nor LFM2.5-2.6B has a published SWE-bench or LiveCodeBench score on this page yet. Use the comparison table for the evals that do exist.
GLM-5.3-Flash supports a 1M token context window, while LFM2.5-2.6B supports 66K tokens. GLM-5.3-Flash 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.
Shared benchmark scores for GLM-5.3-Flash and LFM2.5-2.6B are still limited. Check the comparison table for the evals each model has published. 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-5.3-Flash and LFM2.5-2.6B are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, LFM2.5-2.6B 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-5.3-Flash through Z AI and LFM2.5-2.6B through Liquid 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 Liquid AI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.z.ai/guides/overview/pricing and https://www.liquid.ai. 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-5.3-Flash supports up to 131K output tokens per request, while LFM2.5-2.6B supports up to an unspecified number of 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-5.3-Flash nor LFM2.5-2.6B 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-5.3-Flash or LFM2.5-2.6B 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-5.3-Flash costs $0.15/M input and $0.50/M output. LFM2.5-2.6B costs $0.02/M input and $0.02/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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