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Z.ai (Zhipu AI) — free tier setup
What you get free
Permanently free GLM "Flash" models on the international Z.AI platform, no credit card. Catalog quota: "Permanent free models, no credit card required. Rate limit: 1 concurrent request (mnfst data.json). Z.ai pricing page: GLM-4.7-Flash and GLM-4.5-Flash 'Free' for input, cached input, cached input storage, and output; GLM-4.6V-Flash free vision model." Category: permanent_free. The gotcha: the free models are concurrency-limited (1 in-flight request), not RPM/TPM-limited — throughput is bounded by model latency, and any parallelism 429s immediately. Also don't confuse platforms: international = api.z.ai; mainland China = open.bigmodel.cn — same model family, separate account systems.
Friction check
| Credit card | no |
| Phone verification | unknown |
| Org/membership | no |
| Est. time to first key | 5m |
| Trains on your prompts | unknown |
The rest of this guide — the key-obtain walkthrough, first request, the limits that will bite you, and the rotation runbook — ships with the Indie field library. What you’ve read above is the real first section, not a blurred preview; the remainder simply isn’t in this page.