Revolut reports roughly 90% lower AI coding inference costs with self-hosted GLM

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Revolut made self-hosted GLM its default for AI coding, reporting roughly 90% lower inference costs than relying primarily on commercial services such as Claude. This is an internal deployment for its engineers, not a public coding service.

Here's what changed:

• Revolut reported GLM-5.1 inference at $0.30 per million input/output tokens, about one-tenth its stated cost for OpenAI Codex or Anthropic Claude Code.
• Serving optimizations brought time to first token below three seconds at around 256,000 tokens of context, with generation around 200 tokens per second, Revolut reported.
• The rollout reached roughly 2,000 engineers. Revolut says coding time improved 60% and lead time improved 70%.
• Revolut moved from GLM-5.1 to GLM-5.3, serving GLM-5.3 on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs.

One catch: GLM did not fully replace GPT or Claude. It is text-only and not ideal for UI work, so Revolut routed vision queries to other models.

Sources: theregister.com