MiniMax H3 guide: specs, licence and prices, updated weekly

Updated 26 Sep 2026 · next update 3 Oct 2026

Key facts as of 26 Sep 2026

• The model: MiniMax H3 is a general-purpose omni-modal system built on a 33B-parameter dense single-stream Transformer, with about 13B of those parameters in AdaLN branches that can be skipped at inference because their outputs are cached. (source)
• Output: up to 15 seconds at 2K, with the shorter side at 768 pixels by default and 32 kHz stereo audio generated natively; 2K comes from an H3-Regenerate-2K pass that feeds the 768p result back through the model rather than from a separate super-resolution module. (source)
• Release date: the community licence carries the date the release is tied to, stating "MiniMax H3 release date/License date: August 2, 2026". (source)
• Licence: royalty-free worldwide except the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States; commercial products and services that earn more than $20 million a year in revenue need MiniMax's separate written authorisation, and a commercial product using H3 must display "MiniMax H3". (source)
• Territories: MiniMax's grant is limited to the applicable territory and it invites anyone in an excluded territory to contact it for a licence. (source)
• What the open weights do not include: H3-Context-IR, the stage that parses an instruction across modalities, needs hosted models and services and is not in the open release; H3-Regenerate-2K, the module that produces 2K, is not yet open-sourced either, so local weights give 768p and MiniMax's API is the route to 2K. (source)
• Attention: the initial open release runs full attention only, with sparse attention promised in a later update. (source)
• Rate at fal: $0.05 a second at 480p, $0.06 at 768p, $0.13 at 2K and $0.16 at 4K. (source)
• Rate at Higgsfield: the API console listed MiniMax H3 at $0.091 a second on 26 September 2026, 30% off a $0.13 list. (source)
• H3 Max: Higgsfield added MiniMax H3 Max on 31 August 2026, a post-trained variant tuned for prompt adherence and aesthetics that caps at 768p where the base model reaches 2K. (source)

MiniMax H3 is on three routes at three prices: fal charges $0.06 a second at 768p, Higgsfield's console listed $0.091 a second at 30% off on 26 September 2026, and the open weights run at 768p on your own hardware while 2K output stays behind MiniMax's own API. (source)

What MiniMax H3 is

MiniMax H3 is MiniMax's general-purpose multimodal generation model, announced on 31 July 2026 with weights released under a community licence dated 2 August 2026. It generates video with native stereo sound, up to 15 seconds, at up to 2K, and it takes text, images, video and audio in the same context, which is the point of the design: MiniMax says H3 abandons the split between text-to-video, image-to-video, motion reference, voice reference and editing in favour of one model that follows instructions expressed in natural language (launch post).

The architecture is published. The model card describes a 33B dense single-stream Transformer with roughly 13B parameters in AdaLN branches, which can be cached and left out of an inference-only deployment; text is encoded by an H3-Encoder that uses the full pretrained weights of Qwen3-VL-32B and passes hidden states from its 50th layer; and audio is compressed by an H3-AudioVAE at 40 latent tokens a second per channel. Video and audio latents are predicted jointly by the H3-Omni-Transformer and decoded into picture and stereo sound. The card's deployment example is SGLang on four GPUs, and it points to a separate deployment guide for other configurations.

Three parts of the system are not in the open weights. H3-Context-IR, the stage that parses an instruction and associates it across modalities, relies on hosted models and services, so it is excluded and MiniMax offers an API that reproduces its behaviour. H3-Regenerate-2K, the module that turns a 768p result into 2K, is described in the card as not yet open-sourced, with a MiniMax API for validating official results. And the initial release runs full attention: sparse attention, which the card says reduces the cost of long multimodal sequences, comes in a later update.

MiniMax's own framing of the price is that H3's per-second cost is less than a third of mainstream models at 2K and less than half of their 720p price at 768p. Both are the vendor's claims about its own model rather than measured comparisons.

What MiniMax H3 costs

• Open weights: free to download under the MiniMax H3 Community License, and the local model reaches 768p. Higher resolutions require MiniMax's own API, and the licence restricts where the weights may be used at all.
• fal: published rates are $0.05 a second at 480p, $0.06 at 768p, $0.13 at 2K and $0.16 at 4K, across durations of 5 to 15 seconds and seven aspect ratios.
• Higgsfield: the API console listed H3 at $0.091 a second on 26 September 2026, marked 30% off a $0.13 list.
• MiniMax's own app: Hailuo AI lists H3 in its tool set and quotes it by the second: 2K video from $0.081 a second and 768p video from $0.047 a second. (source)
• H3 Max resellers: Pixazo cut the price of H3 Max on its API to 4 cents a second on 23 September 2026, as SLOP TV reported.

There is no per-token arithmetic to do here, which makes H3 easier to budget than models billed on output area. The resolution you pick is most of the cost: 768p to 2K is more than double the rate at fal, and the open weights stop at 768p.

What MiniMax H3 does

Video with sound in one pass. Up to 15 seconds at 2K, with native stereo audio at 32 kHz. MiniMax says voice, sound effects and music are modelled together rather than as separate tasks, and that multi-shot structure is native rather than assembled afterwards.

Instruction following across modalities. The prompt in MiniMax's own example is a relationship between inputs rather than a description: "Reference the Hitchcock camera movement from Video 1, have the character in Image 2 sing, with the vocals matching Audio 3." The model is meant to work out what that means.

Reference and edit. The launch post lists generalised reference and editing across image-to-image, image-to-video, audio-to-audio and audio-video-to-audio-video, which is the same generality claim stated as a capability list rather than as a set of modes.

Two limits worth knowing. Fifteen seconds is the ceiling, against the 30 seconds ByteDance claims for a single pass of Seedance 2.5, so longer work is a stitching job. And 2K output is a second pass over the 768p result rather than a single higher-resolution generation, which is why the model reuses the original context instead of a super-resolution module: MiniMax says this recovers small text and fine detail that upscaling can only guess at. That second pass is one of the parts that is not in the open weights.

Where it runs. Open weights for local use, the MiniMax API, Hailuo AI, fal, Higgsfield, and inside other products' model menus, including Perplexity's Computer workspace, which SLOP TV reported adding H3 and Seedance 2.5 in September 2026.

Who MiniMax H3 is for

Three distinct buyers. Teams that need video generation on their own hardware are the ones the open weights are for, and the licence decides whether they qualify: deployments inside the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States are outside the granted territory, and MiniMax invites anyone there to contact it for a licence. A company whose commercial products and services earn more than $20 million a year has to get MiniMax's written authorisation before using H3 commercially, and any commercial product built on it must display "MiniMax H3" on the interface.

Studios and developers who want an endpoint rather than a deployment compare per-second rates, where the resolution ladder decides the cost. And creators who want a finished clip buy it inside an app, where the subscription allowance is the constraint rather than the rate.

The licence is the thing to read before building on H3. It is royalty-free and allows commercial work and derivative models, but it limits use to the applicable territory, which excludes the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States, and it adds a revenue threshold and an attribution requirement on top.

The MiniMax H3 diary

Dated entries, newest first. Each entry is added once and never rewritten; corrections are made in a new entry.

26 Sep 2026

The hub opens. This first entry records the news the page starts from.

On 26 September the Higgsfield API console listed MiniMax H3 at $0.091 a second, marked 30% off a $0.13 list. Source: Higgsfield console.

On 23 September Pixazo cut the price of MiniMax H3 Max on its API to 4 cents a second, SLOP TV reported the same day. Source: SLOP TV.

On 22 September SLOP TV reported HelloGen's unlimited generation on MiniMax H3 at $19.90 a month with a floor of two priority renders a day, and Perplexity's addition of H3 to its Computer workspace at $20 and $200 a month. Sources: SLOP TV, SLOP TV.

On 31 August Higgsfield added MiniMax H3 Max, a post-trained variant tuned for prompt adherence and aesthetics that caps at 768p where the base model reaches 2K. Source: Higgsfield changelog.

MiniMax announced H3 on 31 July 2026 with native stereo audio and up to 15 seconds at 2K, and released the weights under its community licence dated 2 August 2026. Sources: MiniMax, licence.

What changed this week

First edition, so there is no earlier edition to compare against. The page is built from MiniMax's own launch post and licence text, the Hugging Face model card, fal's published rates, and the Higgsfield changelog and API console, with SLOP TV's own reporting filling in the reseller routes. The next edition will be measured against this one.

SLOP TV's MiniMax H3 coverage

• Pixazo cuts MiniMax H3 Max API price to 4 cents a second (23 Sep 2026)
• fal.live comes back with AI-generated prompts viewers can upvote (23 Sep 2026)
• Perplexity Computer adds MiniMax H3 and Seedance 2.5 video (22 Sep 2026)
• HelloGen sells unlimited AI video on one model for $19.90 (22 Sep 2026)
• The 7 Cheapest AI Video APIs Right Now, Ranked by Price Per Second (20 Sep 2026)
• Google's Veo, Alibaba's Wan and Pruna AI Are Now Fighting Over Cents Per Second (20 Sep 2026)
• OpenAI's Sora API Shuts Down Sept. 24: Where Its 4 Biggest Jobs Go Next (20 Sep 2026)
• MiniMax Open-Sourced H3 to Buy Distribution. The Market Paid, Then Took It Back (19 Sep 2026)
• Pika Relaunches as a Multi-App Studio With 3-Minute Videos & Automatic Model Routing (19 Sep 2026)
• MiniMax H3 Add-Ons Are Piling Up on Hugging Face: 8-Step LoRAs, a WASD World Model & More (19 Sep 2026)
• MiniMax H3 Licence Explained: Who Can Run the Open Weights & What the 4 Excluded Regions Must Do (19 Sep 2026)
• 5 Best Open-Weights AI Video Models to Run Yourself, Ranked: LTX-2.5 Tops Wan 2.2 (19 Sep 2026)