Zhipu's MaaS revenue hits 86.5% of total as AI business model shifts from selling models to selling tasks
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-09-05
- Zhipu's H1 2026 revenue hit RMB 954M (+399.7% YoY), with MaaS/API at RMB 825M — 86.5% of total vs 15.2% a year ago, while on-prem deployment fell from 84.8% to 13.5%.
- Token volume grew 40x since the start of the year, average API price rose 101%, unit inference cost fell 80%, and MaaS gross margin hit 24.6%.
- Industry-wide rationing: Zhipu killed its unlimited GLM Coding Plan and now sells token packs on Tmall (Lite/Pro/Max at RMB 118/538/1078 per month); Kimi paused new consumer subscriptions, Alibaba Cloud discontinued Lite plans, Tencent raised some Hunyuan prices over 460%.
- A Jevons-paradox dynamic: cheaper tokens meet agentic workloads consuming hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens per task; global weekly token usage jumped 250% to 22.7T in one quarter.
- Zhipu frames its path as "sell models → sell calls → sell subscriptions → sell end-to-end task outcomes," with pricing shifting from per-token to per-task.
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