MiniMax H3

MiniMax H3 is MiniMax's general-purpose video model, announced on 31 July 2026 and open-sourced on 3 August 2026 - which makes it the outlier in this category, because you can either pay per second on an API or download the weights and run it yourself. It reads text, images, video and audio as inputs and returns a clip at up to 2K resolution, 4 to 15 seconds long at 24fps, with native stereo audio in the same pass. First-and-last-frame and multimodal reference modes let a character, a camera move or a voice carry across generations instead of being re-prompted from scratch.

On hosted endpoints the meter is the second of output. Third-party listings for H3 put 2K at about $0.145 a second and 768P at $0.097 - a 10-second 2K clip around $1.45 - with reference audio free, the first five reference images free, and additional stills billed per image; 2K and 4K inputs are silently downgraded to 768P, and one reseller exposes only 512p and 768p at all, so the resolution you actually get depends on which door you enter through. MiniMax's own developer subscription is a different shape: it caps generation in rolling windows rather than a credit pool, and its entry tier excludes video outright.

The open-weights route is what changes the arithmetic. Nothing stops self-hosting, so the cost becomes GPU time, and post-trained variants already exist - a high-speed H3 Max build is offered alongside the base model for teams that trade a little quality for turnaround. H3 suits developers wiring video into a product and anyone with spare compute; it is not a managed studio with brand kits, and support, resolution guarantees and SLAs come from whichever API you route through, not from the model itself.