GLM 5.2 Free Is Gone From OpenRouter

Sometime before 06:37 UTC on 7 September 2026, the GLM 5.2 free endpoint stopped existing. If you went looking for GLM 5.2 free access this morning, OpenRouter's own model page told you the price was still "Free" while quietly serving zero endpoints behind it. No changelog entry, no deprecation banner, no email. The model id z-ai/glm-5.2:free still resolves; it just has nowhere to route.

Key Takeaways:

• z-ai/glm-5.2:free was removed from OpenRouter's model list between the 6 September and 7 September snapshots. As of 2026-09-07 the id returns a model record with an empty endpoints array.
• The base z-ai/glm-5.2 model is unaffected and still has 33 live endpoints, none of them priced at zero.
• The cheapest paid route as of 2026-09-07 is DeepInfra at $0.4875 input and $1.56 output per million tokens, a 35% discount against its own $0.75 / $2.40 list.
• Z.ai's own list price for GLM-5.2 has not moved: $1.40 input, $0.26 cached input, $4.40 output per million tokens.
• Whether this is permanent or another rate-limit flap is genuinely unknown. Free endpoints on OpenRouter have flapped before, which is why this article carries a review date of 14 September 2026.

What happened to GLM 5.2 free on OpenRouter

The daily diff of GET /api/v1/models is unglamorous but it catches things newsletters never report. On 6 September the catalogue held 433 entries. On 7 September it held 430, and one of the three that vanished was "Z.ai: GLM 5.2 (free)".

That is the whole announcement. There wasn't one.

You can check it yourself without an API key. The models endpoint returns the live catalogue as JSON; filter for glm-5.2 and you get exactly one row now, priced at $0.000000966 per input token. Ask specifically for the free variant's endpoints and the response is stranger:

GET https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/models/z-ai/glm-5.2:free/endpoints
→ 200 OK
{"data":{"id":"z-ai/glm-5.2:free","name":"Z.ai: GLM 5.2", ... "endpoints":[]}}

Two hundred OK, a complete model record, and an empty list where the providers used to be. The catalogue remembers the model. Nothing serves it.

The error your agent is actually returning

Four days before the removal, a user on r/openrouter pasted the exact string their agent was throwing:

[Decart] z-ai/glm-5.2:free is temporarily rate-limited upstream. Please retry shortly

Decart is one of the providers that served the free tier and still serves the paid one, currently at $0.684 / $2.28 per million. That message reads like weather. It isn't; it was the last stage of a route being drained, and the word "temporarily" did a lot of work it could not cash.

The distinction matters for debugging. A rate-limited endpoint answers eventually. An endpoint that no longer exists cannot be retried into working, and a retry loop against a dead model id will burn your backoff budget forever without ever surfacing a useful error. If your agent has been quietly retrying glm-5.2:free since this morning, that loop is the bug.

Why the page still says "Free"

Look at the screenshot above and then at the paid page below. Same model, same 1M context, same Jun 17 2026 release date. The free page shows a price card reading "Free" and a left-hand nav with three items: Activity, FAQ, Explore. The paid page shows eight, starting with Providers.

That missing Providers tab is the tell. OpenRouter renders it from live endpoint data, so a model with none simply doesn't get the section. The price card, meanwhile, is derived from the model record's pricing fields, which still say zero because nobody edited them. So the page advertises a price for a route that cannot be taken, and it will keep advertising it until someone deletes the record.

Which is why the top of Google is currently wrong about this. Search GLM 5.2 free right now and page one is a Medium post, a GitHub gist, an apidog tutorial and OpenRouter's own :free page. Every one of them was accurate last week.

What GLM 5.2 costs now that the free tier is gone

Thirty-three endpoints, and the spread between them is wider than most people budget for. DeepInfra sits at the floor with $0.4875 in and $1.56 out, carrying a 35% badge struck through from $0.75 / $2.40. Ambient charges $0.60 / $2.00 with no discount. StreamLake and NovitaAI both discount hard from Z.ai's $1.40 / $4.40 anchor, landing near $0.68 / $2.13. DigitalOcean asks $0.70 / $2.20 and answers in 0.93 seconds; CoreWeave charges $0.76 / $2.42 and pushes 133 tokens a second, the fastest in the table.

One detail worth flagging if you read our earlier piece on GLM 5.2 pricing: the claim that every discount badge is measured against a single $1.40 anchor no longer holds. DeepInfra now strikes through $0.75 / $2.40, Decart strikes through $1.20 / $4.00. Providers have started posting their own list prices, so a percentage-off badge tells you less than it did three weeks ago. Read the absolute number, not the badge. It is also the reason we keep the provider table in front of a MoClaw session rather than behind a cached config: a price that gets restruck against a new anchor is not a price change your code will notice.

The one figure that has stayed put is Z.ai's own. Its pricing documentation still lists GLM-5.2 at $1.4 input, $0.26 cached input and $4.4 output per million tokens, with cached input storage marked "Limited-time Free". Nothing on that page has ever offered a free inference tier for 5.2, which is the quiet answer to where the OpenRouter free endpoint came from: not from Z.ai.

The cheap routes that still exist

Eighteen models on OpenRouter still carry a :free suffix as of 2026-09-07, and one of them landed on the same day GLM 5.2's left: inclusionai/ling-3.0-flash-sante:free. That is the shape of this market. Free tiers are promotional inventory, they rotate, and building a workflow on one is building on someone else's marketing calendar.

If you want GLM 5.2 specifically and you want it cheap, the honest options are: pin DeepInfra explicitly rather than trusting default routing, use provider.sort: "price" so the platform re-asks the cheapest question on every request, or accept the $1.40 list and buy predictability. Cached input at $0.26 is the biggest lever nobody pulls; a long system prompt reused across a thousand agent turns is the difference between a $50 day and a $9 one.

Worth being blunt about the arithmetic, though. A free endpoint is not cheap, it is unbudgeted, and the two feel identical right up until the morning they don't. A fixed number behaves differently: MoClaw's $20 plan is 1,000 credits a month and the trial is 1,000 credits over three days, which is a smaller allowance than an unmetered free tier and a considerably more useful one, because a number you can plan against does not vanish at 06:37 UTC. That is the trade the last twelve hours have been arguing for.

There is also the version question. GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-Flash are both on OpenRouter now, and Flash runs at $0.075 / $0.25 with a 50% promotion that Z.ai's docs say ends at 24:00 on 9 September 2026 (UTC+8). If your workload tolerated a free tier's throttling, it will probably tolerate Flash. We wrote up the differences in what GLM 5.3 changed.

If your code hard-codes glm-5.2:free

Grep for the literal string first. It hides in more places than people expect: .env files, docker-compose overrides, a fallback_model constant nobody has read since June, and the config of whatever CLI wrapper you installed in August.

Then decide what should happen when the model id under you evaporates, because that decision is the actual work. A hard-coded id is a bet that a third party will keep a promotional route open. Fallback chains help, but only if something is watching them; a fallback that silently drops you from a free model to a $4.40 output rate is a bill, not a save. This is one of the places MoClaw earns its keep: model selection and fallback sit in the platform rather than in your repository, so a vendor pulling a route becomes a routing change on our side instead of an incident on yours, and your existing OpenRouter account keeps working exactly as it did.

One more thing worth checking while you are in there: whether the machine running the retry loop is your laptop. Long-horizon agent work against a 1M context window tends to outlive the session that started it, and a lid closing is indistinguishable from an endpoint dying if the only thing watching is a process on your own hardware. MoClaw is a hosted cloud AI computer that sits alongside your existing setup rather than replacing it, which gives that loop somewhere to keep running and somewhere to log what it hit.

The wider point is that "free" was never a tier. It was a queue, and queues close.

FAQ

Is GLM 5.2 free on OpenRouter?

Not as of 7 September 2026. The z-ai/glm-5.2:free id was removed from the model catalogue that morning and now returns an empty endpoints array. The model page still displays a price of "Free" because the record's pricing fields were not updated, but no provider is serving requests at zero.

Why did glm-5.2:free disappear?

Neither OpenRouter nor Z.ai published a notice, so any specific cause would be guesswork. What the data shows is a gradual failure rather than a switch being thrown: users were reporting upstream rate limiting on the free route as early as 3 September, and the model's activity chart shows traffic peaking around 5.7 billion prompt tokens on 5 September before the listing went.

What's the cheapest way to run GLM 5.2 now?

DeepInfra at $0.4875 input and $1.56 output per million tokens, checked 7 September 2026. Discounts expire without warning, so treat that as a query rather than an answer; sorting by price on every request keeps the question live instead of freezing a stale winner into your config.

Will the free tier come back?

Possibly. OpenRouter free endpoints have gone dark and returned before, usually after upstream capacity frees up, and the model record surviving with an empty provider list is consistent with a route being parked rather than deleted. We have a review scheduled for 14 September 2026 and will update this page either way.

Does this affect the paid z-ai/glm-5.2 model?

No. The base model kept all 33 endpoints through the change. Only the :free variant was pulled, and calls to z-ai/glm-5.2 were never routed through it.

Where to point your GLM 5.2 workload this week

Pin a provider, log what your fallback actually did, and stop treating a free suffix as infrastructure. The rate limits on Z.ai's own coding plan are a useful second data point here, because they show the same pattern from the vendor's side: generous headline, ceilings you meet later.

And put a date on it. The reason this page tells you 7 September 2026 in eleven different places is that every number above has a half-life, and the last three weeks of GLM 5.2 have burned through several of them already.