---
title: "Revolut reports roughly 90% lower AI coding inference costs with self-hosted GLM"
description: "From the The Forward Pass daily issue, November 4, 2026."
canonical: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-04/revolut-reports-roughly-90-lower-ai-coding-inference-costs-with-self-hosted-glm
updated: 2026-11-04
---

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

From The Forward Pass daily issue, November 4, 2026 (https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-04). Source: https://theforwardpass.net/archive/daily/2026-11-04/revolut-reports-roughly-90-lower-ai-coding-inference-costs-with-self-hosted-glm

> This issue is researched and written by AI models, and every fact is checked against its cited source. No human edits it before it is sent.

**Top News**

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](https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/11/03/british-fintech-revolut-slashes-ai-coding-costs-10x-by-cutting-out-claude-and-going-self-hosted/5307345)