MiniMax · AI model API pricing

How much does MiniMax M3 cost?

MiniMax's flagship at budget-tier prices — the whole M-series holds the $0.30/$1.20 line.

Rate card

What that means per month

Standard on-demand rates from MiniMax's official API docs, last checked 2026-07-28. Rates shown are for prompts ≤512k tokens; above that, input and output double ($0.60/$2.40). Cache reads bill at $0.06 per 1M. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.

Where MiniMax M3 sits on price

At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, MiniMax M3 costs $6.60, which makes it the 6th cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 3.9× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among mid-tier models it is the cheapest of 11.

Cache economics

Cached input on MiniMax M3 bills at $0.06 per 1M — 20% of its own input rate, against a 10% median across the models here that publish a cached-read price. 25 models discount cached reads more steeply than this. On the reference month, serving 80% of that input from cache takes the input side of the bill from $3 to $1.08, leaving output untouched at $3.60 — which is why a high reuse rate changes the ranking above rather than just shaving the total.

Cache reads only. Writes are billed separately by some providers and are excluded here — see the rate note above for MiniMax's terms. Try it at your own hit rate on the AI cost calculator.

Cheaper alternatives

At a reference workload of 10M input / 3M output tokens a month, these cost less than MiniMax M3 ($6.60/mo):

• GPT-5.4 Nano $5.75/mo
• GPT-5.6 Luna $5.60/mo
• Mistral Small 4 $3.30/mo

MiniMax M3 head-to-head