GLM guides mostly walk you through Zhipu's own console — Chinese-language signup, phone verification, region friction. For a lot of developers the easier route now is that z-ai/glm-5.2:free sits in OpenRouter's free catalog: standard OpenAI-compatible call, no separate account.
It's one of only ~21 free models there, and one of the few of that group tuned hard for coding and tool use. The catch is the shared free-tier rate gate (20 requests/min, and a daily cap that depends on whether you've ever bought $10 of credit), so it's a prototyping surface, not a production allocation.
Zhipu direct still makes sense when you want the bigger context or the flash-tier models that don't appear on OpenRouter — that's where the console friction buys you something.
Both routes, with the current model table: https://toolfreebie.com/glm-free-api/
Top comments (0)