MiniMax M3 API Pricing
MiniMax · Budget · Proprietary · released 2026-06. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
MiniMax M3 has held the same list price since 2026-08-15 and is the 107th cheapest of 142 Budget models. Buying from CoreWeave rather than at the rate quoted here lowers the token price by about 20%, for a quantized fp4 build. It is rated a stable release but does not meet all four criteria of the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $0.30 per 1M tokens
- Output: $1.20 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: $0.06
- Context window: 1M
- Arena ELO: 1440 (as of 2026-09-25)
- Available on: Direct API, OpenRouter (curated by hand, verify with the provider)
MiniMax M3 market position
On blended price ($0.930 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 21% of Budget models: 107th cheapest of 142, tied with 6 others. Across every category it is cheaper than 60% of priced text models in the catalogue: 107th cheapest of 281, tied with 6 others. Its Arena ELO of 1440 ranks 35th of the 68 models that carry one, above 49% of them.
MiniMax M3 licence, size and capabilities
MiniMax M3 is recorded here as proprietary: access is through an API, priced by the token. Its parameter count is not published. Listed capabilities: Text, Vision, Reasoning, Code, Agents. Filling its 1M context window once costs $0.30 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $83 – $105 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $122 – $156 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $420 – $444 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $279 – $291 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $294 – $330 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $106 – $117 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $139 – $144 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $439 – $540 |
MiniMax M3 pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 13 different hosts. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-09-28 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown. These hosts do not all serve the model at the same numeric precision, so the cheapest is not a like-for-like substitute for the dearest.
Cheapest host: CoreWeave at $0.23 input / $0.96 output per 1M tokens, 20% below the price we publish on a blended basis (30% input, 70% output). It serves a quantized fp4 build, which is not the same product as the full-precision model. The dearest, ModelRun, charges 3.1x the cheapest.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave — fp4 | $0.23 | $0.96 |
| GMICloud — fp8 | $0.24 | $0.96 |
| DeepInfra — fp8 | $0.28 | $1.10 |
| StreamLake (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| Venice (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| Together (the price shown above) | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| Parasail (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| AtlasCloud (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| Novita (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| Minimax (the price shown above) — fp8 | $0.30 | $1.20 |
| Mara | $0.60 | $2.40 |
| SambaNova | $0.60 | $2.40 |
| ModelRun — fp4 | $0.75 | $3.00 |
MiniMax M3 price history
MiniMax M3 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
Alternatives to MiniMax M3
- Next cheaper Budget model: GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI) at $0.900 blended, 3% less.
- Next more expensive: GPT-5.4 Nano (OpenAI) at $0.935 blended, 1% more.
The nearest Budget models on Arena ELO, each with its blended price and score difference against MiniMax M3.
- DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 (DeepSeek) — $0.09 in / $0.18 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1436: 84% cheaper, 4 ELO points lower
- GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI) — $0.20 in / $1.20 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1454: 3% cheaper, 14 ELO points higher
- DeepSeek V3.2 (DeepSeek) — $0.28 in / $0.42 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1425: 59% cheaper, 15 ELO points lower
- Qwen3.7 Plus (Alibaba) — $0.32 in / $1.28 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1456: 7% more expensive, 16 ELO points higher
- Cheapest within 15 Arena points: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 (DeepSeek), 84% cheaper, 4 ELO points lower, out of 13 models in that band.
- Highest Arena ELO within 20% of this price: Qwen3.7 Plus (Alibaba), 7% more expensive, 16 ELO points higher, out of 5 models in that price band.
MiniMax M3 head to head
Common questions about MiniMax M3 pricing
- How much does MiniMax M3 cost?
- MiniMax M3 costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does MiniMax M3 offer batch or cached pricing?
- Prompt-cache reads cost $0.06/M input tokens. No batch pricing is published.
- What would MiniMax M3 cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, MiniMax M3 costs about $105 at list prices.
- Has the price of MiniMax M3 changed?
- MiniMax M3 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.30 input / $1.20 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for MiniMax M3 in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
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