MiniMax H3 Pricing: What Your Clip Actually Costs, Per Second

MiniMax H3 costs $0.08 per second of generated video at 768P and $0.13 per second at 2K. That is the whole answer to “how much does MiniMax H3 cost” — it is billed per second of output, not per request, not per clip, not per token, and the resolution you ask for sets the rate. Those are MiniMax's own pay-as-you-go list prices, read from the vendor's pricing page on 13 October 2026. Input material is metered on top of that: audio references are free, the first five reference images are free and each one after that costs $0.04, and a reference video is billed by its own duration at the same per-second rate as your output.

This page exists because the question arrives in at least five languages — English, Thai, Japanese, Chinese and Korean — and every one of those readers is asking the same thing: what will this clip cost me. The people searching it want a number and a unit, not a product tour. So here is the unit explained properly, the vendor's full rate card with the date it was read, what is free and what is not, three worked clip costs with the arithmetic shown, and the figures MiniMax does not publish. MiniMax H3 itself is the omni-modal video model MiniMax shipped on 31 July 2026, and its launch is not news in October 2026 — what follows is the standing reference for its price.

The unit: seconds of output, multiplied by the resolution you asked for

This is the part that trips people up, because video pricing on this model is not one number. MiniMax meters MiniMax H3 in seconds of generated video, and the seconds are priced by output resolution. A 4-second 768P clip and a 15-second 768P clip are the same rate applied to different durations, which is the good news: you can convert the rate into a clip cost with one multiplication.

What makes it more than one multiplication is that MiniMax meters two things and adds them. The first is output — the length and resolution of the clip you receive. The second is input material — the reference images and reference video you send in. Those are billed separately and on their own rules, and MiniMax's own pricing overview says so in as many words: “H3 video output and input media are billed separately.” A text-to-video prompt with no references is therefore the simplest possible case, and a reference-heavy workflow is not simply the same cost plus a little.

The other thing to know before doing arithmetic is that the reference video is billed at your output resolution, not at the resolution of the clip you sent. A 10-second reference video feeding a 2K output bills at $0.13 per second; the same reference video feeding a 768P output bills at $0.08 per second. Where you send the same material at two output resolutions, the input bill changes with the output, which is not where most people expect the variable to be.

The envelope those seconds live inside, from MiniMax's video generation guide read 13 October 2026:

• Duration — 4 to 15 seconds, integer values only. MiniMax H3 accepts the full 4–15 range; the fast tier, MiniMax H3 Max, starts at 5 seconds and rejects a 4-second request.

• Resolution — 768P or 2K on MiniMax H3. 2K is not available on MiniMax H3 Max at all.

• Aspect ratio — adaptive, or 21:9, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4, 9:16. No aspect ratio carries a published surcharge.

• Prompt — up to 7,000 characters, which is not a billing dimension at all. Longer prompts do not cost more.

• Retrieval — finished tasks are queryable for 7 days. After that the record ages out of the task list, which is a workflow constraint rather than a pricing one, and worth knowing if you batch jobs and reconcile later.

• Rate limit — 300 requests per minute with a maximum of 30 tasks in flight, per MiniMax's rate limits page read 13 October 2026. The limit is stated for MiniMax H3; MiniMax does not publish a separate line for MiniMax H3 Max.

To convert any published rate into a clip cost, the formula is: clip seconds × resolution rate, plus images beyond the fifth × $0.04, plus reference-video seconds × resolution rate. Everything below is that formula applied to real sizes.

The rate card, as published

MiniMax publishes MiniMax H3 pricing on a single pay-as-you-go page, and these are its list prices as read on 13 October 2026. They are vendor-reported figures, not independently audited ones — no third-party price tracker we could find publishes a separate rate for MiniMax H3, so the vendor card is the only authoritative source and it is the one everything on this page rests on.

• MiniMax H3, 768P output — $0.08 per second.

• MiniMax H3, 2K output — $0.13 per second.

• MiniMax H3 Max, 480P output — $0.05 per second. MiniMax H3 Max, 768P output — $0.08 per second.

• Audio input — free, on every tier.

• Image input — first 5 images free, then $0.04 per additional image on MiniMax H3; first 2 free, then $0.074 each on MiniMax H3 Max.

• Reference video input — billed by input duration and output resolution: $0.08 per second at 768P output, $0.13 per second at 2K output on MiniMax H3; $0.0553 at 480P and $0.143 at 768P on MiniMax H3 Max.

• 2K regeneration — $0.05 per second of regenerated output, taking an existing 768P result to 2K. The input material from the original task is billed a second time: images beyond the first five at $0.025 each, and reference video at $0.05 per second.

• H3-Context-IR — $0.90 per million input tokens and $3.60 per million output tokens, for the endpoint that expands a multimodal request into a richer structured prompt. It returns a prompt, not a video, and does not create one.

Three surfaces are worth separating, because they do not carry the same prices. The pay-as-you-go API carries the per-second card above and is the only route MiniMax documents for MiniMax H3. The prepaid video packages — $1,000 to $6,000 for monthly video-point bundles — support the older Hailuo video models, and MiniMax states plainly on both the packages page and the billing-comparison table that MiniMax H3 is not supported by them; the page points H3 users to pay-as-you-go or to a custom plan via sales. The Token Plan subscriptions ($22 / $55 / $132 per month) cover the M-series language models, image and speech, and MiniMax's own footnote lists MiniMax H3 among the special models that are not currently supported. So on every discounted or bundled surface MiniMax sells, the H3 answer is the same: not covered, use pay-as-you-go.

The current figure should always be read from MiniMax's pay-as-you-go page rather than from this page, because a standing reference ages and a vendor card does not. Nothing on the card moved between the sibling coverage of this family in late September 2026 and this reading on 13 October 2026 — the per-second rates are identical — but the check is one page load, and it is the check that matters if you are committing a budget.

What is free and what is not

MiniMax publishes exactly four things that do not cost anything on MiniMax H3, and they are narrow. Read from the vendor's pages on 13 October 2026:

• Audio input is free. Sending reference audio does not add to the bill on any tier.

• The first five reference images are free. The sixth image costs $0.04. That is a per-request allowance, not an account-level one.

• Failed generations inside the prepaid video-point system are not charged — the packages page states that generation failures and videos that trip security review do not deduct video points. That statement sits on the packages page, and MiniMax H3 is not supported by packages, so it is not established that the same grace applies to H3 on pay-as-you-go. We found no MiniMax page stating a refund or no-charge rule for a failed H3 generation billed by the second. Treat a failed H3 job as billable until MiniMax says otherwise, and treat that as an absence of information rather than as a policy.

• Three free H3 generations on MiniMax Design. MiniMax's H3 feature-highlights page offers, under “Try it”, three H3 video generations free through MiniMax Design after claiming desktop benefits. That is a consumer-surface trial tied to a product, not an API credit and not an account-level free tier, and it is the only free allowance MiniMax publishes anywhere near this model. Read on 13 October 2026.

There is no free API tier for MiniMax H3. MiniMax publishes no free monthly allowance, no trial credit balance and no free request quota for the H3 API on its pricing pages, and this page will not describe the general shape of free tiers elsewhere, because a general shape is not a fact about this model. If what you need is a cost-free way to evaluate H3, the published answer is three generations on MiniMax Design; if what you need is free API calls, the published answer is that there are none.

What three real clips cost

Everything below is our arithmetic on MiniMax's published rates, not a figure MiniMax quotes anywhere — the vendor publishes unit rates, not clip prices. Substitute your own duration, resolution and reference counts into the same three lines.

A 10-second 2K clip, text-to-video, no references. 10 seconds × $0.13 per second = $1.30. This is the ceiling case for a plain prompt, since 2K is the most expensive resolution and there is nothing to meter on top. A 4-second version of the same clip is 4 × $0.13 = $0.52, and the 15-second maximum is 15 × $0.13 = $1.95.

A 6-second 768P clip with three reference images. Output: 6 × $0.08 = $0.48. Images: three, inside the five-image free allowance, so $0.00. Total $0.48. This is the case worth internalising, because reference images up to five are genuinely free and a six-second social clip with a handful of character references is one of the cheapest things this model does.

A 10-second 768P clip with eight reference images and a 10-second reference video. Output: 10 × $0.08 = $0.80. Images: 8 − 5 free = 3 chargeable × $0.04 = $0.12. Reference video: 10 seconds, billed at the output resolution, 10 × $0.08 = $0.80. Total $1.72. Note what happened here — the input material cost $0.92 against $0.80 of output, so the references are more than half the bill. The same clip at 2K output would be $1.30 of output plus $0.12 of images plus 10 × $0.13 = $1.30 of reference video, or $2.72.

Taking a 6-second 768P clip to 2K. Regeneration is a separate paid step at $0.05 per second of regenerated output: 6 × $0.05 = $0.30, on top of the $0.48 the original 768P clip cost. Total $0.78 for a 6-second 2K clip produced this way, against $0.78 for generating a 6-second 2K clip directly at 6 × $0.13 = $0.78. The two routes land in the same place at six seconds; the regeneration route starts to lose ground as clips get longer, and it also bills the original task's input material again.

What MiniMax does not publish

A price page that only repeats the vendor's card is not much of a price page, so here is what could not be established from MiniMax's own material on 13 October 2026.

MiniMax publishes no per-clip or per-request price for MiniMax H3, and no package that gets you a lower effective per-second rate. The only route to a discount MiniMax names is to contact sales for a custom plan, which is an offer with no published rate behind it. There is also no published price for the consumer Hailuo surface — MiniMax's consumer video product is a subscription tier, and neither its pricing page nor the API's platform listing published a per-clip figure we could read today, so a reader asking what H3 costs on Hailuo Premium has no vendor-published number to consult.

There is no refund or no-charge rule published for a failed H3 generation billed per second, as covered above. There is no published latency or throughput figure for the model and therefore no way to price a batch job's wall-clock time from the vendor's material. And there is no independent price measurement for MiniMax H3 specifically — no third-party tracker we could find publishes a competing rate for this model, which means every number on this page traces back to one document. That is worth saying out loud rather than dressing up: the vendor card is the only source, and a reader who wants a second opinion does not currently have one.

MiniMax H3 on OrcaRouter

MiniMax H3 is served on OrcaRouter under the model id minimax/minimax-h3, confirmed against our live model list on 13 October 2026, on the video generation endpoint. The provider's list price passes through unmarked at 0% markup: our catalogue entry records $0.08 per second, the vendor's 768P rate, and our model page for MiniMax H3 states the same two figures MiniMax does — $0.08 per second at 768P and $0.13 per second at 2K — with input material metered on top on the vendor's rules. Because nothing is added on our side, a change to MiniMax's card reaches you the same day rather than at a marked-up rate, and if you are already calling other models through the same key, the H3 rate sits in the same bill as everything else. Generation runs as an asynchronous task: submit, poll, download.

What to do with the number depends on which side of it you are on. If your output is 768P and your clip is short, the per-second rate is small enough that the reference material is the thing to watch — five free images and a reference video billed at output resolution are what actually move the total. If your output is 2K, MiniMax H3 is the only tier in this family that produces it, and $0.13 per second is the price of that capability rather than a premium you can shop around. And if you are about to commit a budget to H3 volume, the single most useful thing this page can tell you is the least satisfying: the per-second rates are vendor-reported, there is no free API allowance to absorb a pilot, and everything except three trial generations on MiniMax Design goes on the meter.