Zhipu AI launched its "City-Wide Coding Plan" on September 10, offering subsidized coding packages to anyone who works in Hangzhou, students enrolled at Hangzhou universities, and companies registered in the city's Shangcheng District. The blended discount comes to 44% off personal quarterly plans, 51% off personal annual plans, and 55% off enterprise annual plans.
The rules are posted on Zhipu's open-platform documentation site, with prices listed tier by tier. For individuals, a Lite quarterly plan drops from 354 yuan to 198.24 yuan; Pro quarterly goes from 1,614 yuan to 903.84 yuan; Max quarterly falls from 3,234 yuan to 1,811.04 yuan. On the annual tier, Lite drops from 1,416 yuan to 693.84 yuan, Pro from 6,456 yuan to 3,163.44 yuan, and Max from 12,936 yuan to 6,338.64 yuan. Enterprise annual plans are priced per seat: the Standard tier falls from 7,176 yuan to 3,229.2 yuan, and the Premium tier from 14,376 yuan to 6,469.2 yuan.
Eligibility is tied to where you work, not where you're registered
Applicants need to submit either proof of social insurance contributions or an online verification report from Xuexin (China's national student-record platform) -- one or the other. That design anchors eligibility to "physically working or studying in Hangzhou," rather than household registration (hukou) or a company's place of incorporation. Each individual can claim the subsidy only once and must choose either the quarterly or annual plan, not both. On the enterprise side, only annual packages qualify, and each company is capped at 1 million yuan in total subsidy.
Applicants are notified by text message once approved, after which they can place an order directly at the subsidized price. The documentation notes that the platform will process account information, real-name verification, and any personal data contained in the supporting documents.
Subsidies drawn along city lines are still unusual in the large-model business. Price cuts over the past two years have mostly been uniform nationwide moves, or tiers split by new-versus-existing users or by usage volume. Narrowing the geographic scope to a single city -- and narrowing the enterprise scope further to a single district -- looks more like the execution of a local industrial policy than ordinary commercial pricing.
Running the numbers
Take a personal Pro annual plan as an example: it drops from 6,456 yuan to 3,163.44 yuan, which works out to 8.67 yuan a day across 365 days. Renewing the same tier four times via the quarterly plan would cost 903.84 yuan × 4, or 3,615.36 yuan -- 451.92 yuan more than the annual plan. But since the rules require picking one or the other, and allow only one claim per person, that comparison only matters when deciding which plan to pick in the first place.
The enterprise math can be pushed a layer further. A subsidized Standard seat costs 3,229.2 yuan a year, so the 1-million-yuan cap divides out to roughly 309 seats; a Premium seat costs 6,469.2 yuan, putting the cap at roughly 154 seats. Tech teams larger than 300 people are not common even in Shangcheng District, so this ceiling doesn't bind for most applicants -- though that's a rough estimate, and the real figure depends on whether a company mixes both tiers.
Seen against Zhipu's own published API pricing -- its GLM-5.3 model runs $4.4 per million output tokens on a pay-as-you-go basis -- the package model works on a different logic. It locks in a year of usage up front and then trades price for retention. The subsidy pulls the annual plan down to roughly half price, effectively flattening out a year's worth of switching cost in one move.
What's still unresolved
Whether the subsidy money comes from Zhipu itself, from Shangcheng District's fiscal budget, or is split between the two isn't stated in the rules. Whether there's a hard cap on the number of slots, whether the program stops once that cap is hit, and when the campaign actually ends are likewise unaddressed. For now, all that's visible is the September 10 start date.
The metric that will actually judge a plan like this is the renewal rate once the subsidy period ends -- how many people signed up tells you very little on its own. That number won't be available until roughly this time next year, and it's an open question whether it will ever be made public.
Sources: Zhipu AI open-platform documentation, CocoLoop; original and subsidized prices for each tier were cross-checked against the official rules page, and the per-day cost and seat-count estimates are rough calculations based on the published prices.