Cost per coding-agent request

Is MiniMax M2.1 or MiniMax M3 cheaper for coding agents?

For coding agents, MiniMax M3 costs 1.4x as much as MiniMax M2.1 per request ($0.0088 vs $0.0065 on our measured traffic), because MiniMax M3 lists at $0.30 input, $0.06 cached input and $1.20 output per million tokens against $0.30, $0.03 and $1.20 for MiniMax M2.1.

List prices: OpenRouter listed price, checked 2026-10-13. Request costs: Standard Compute gateway data, 79,301 coding-agent requests from 75 users, Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026. How we compute this

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Cost per coding-agent request, side by side

Cost at list price	MiniMax M2.1	MiniMax M3
Prompt under 100K tokens50% of requests, 87% of input cached	$0.0045	$0.0060
Prompt of 100K to 272K39% of requests, 88% of input cached	$0.0099	$0.014
Prompt over 272K tokens11% of requests, 86% of input cached	n/a	n/a
Average request	$0.0065	$0.0088
100 requests	$0.65	$0.88
Median session16 requests; a session ends after 10 idle minutes	$0.076	$0.10
A month of regular usemedian of 20 users active on 5+ days	$7.18	$9.33

Each logged request priced at the listed rates above for its own token counts, including cache reads and any higher rate for long prompts. Average output: 698 tokens per request. Both models are priced on the requests up to 205K tokens that fit in both context windows; band shares above describe all requests.

Benchmarks, speed and latency, side by side

Artificial Analysis	MiniMax M2.1	MiniMax M3
Intelligence Index10 evaluations, 0 to 100	21 (estimate)	29
Terminal-Bench 4.0agentic coding in a terminal	n/a	2.0%
Output speedmedian	67 tokens/s	119 tokens/s
Time to first answer tokenincludes thinking time	31 s	18 s

Source: Artificial Analysis (artificialanalysis.ai). Measured variants: MiniMax-M2.1, speed on MiniMax; MiniMax-M3, speed on MiniMax. Fetched October 13, 2026. Artificial Analysis runs Terminal-Bench 4.0 in its own setup, so its scores differ from the tbench.ai leaderboard.

What to watch for

MiniMax M2.1's 205K window cannot take 20% of coding-agent requests, so the comparison uses only requests both can take. 87% of agent input is read from cache, and MiniMax M3 charges $0.06 per million for it against $0.03. The price is OpenRouter's listed rate on October 13, 2026, which can be a third-party host's; MiniMax's own API may charge differently.

FAQ

Is MiniMax M2.1 cheaper than MiniMax M3 for coding agents?

Yes, at the listed prices. 100 average coding-agent requests cost $0.65 on MiniMax M2.1 and $0.88 on MiniMax M3. A median 16-request session costs $0.076 vs $0.10. Measured on 79,301 real coding-agent requests (Sep 13 to Oct 12, 2026), counting only the requests up to 205K tokens that both can take.

How much does a month of MiniMax M3 vs MiniMax M2.1 cost?

For the median regular user in our data (1,478 requests in 30 days), about $9.33 on MiniMax M3 and $7.18 on MiniMax M2.1 at list price. Heavier users pay proportionally more.

MiniMax M2.1 vs MiniMax M3: which is better for agents?

MiniMax M3 scores higher on output quality (6.3/10 vs 5.1/10), while MiniMax M3 is the cheaper option. MiniMax M2.1 is best for short, tool-heavy agent steps on a tight budget; MiniMax M3 is best for agents that need an open-weight model with a 1M context. Live community votes on this page show what people actually prefer.

Can I switch between MiniMax M2.1 and MiniMax M3 in the same agent?

Yes. Model-agnostic agents (Cline, Aider, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, Kilo Code, OpenCode) let you swap models per task. Many people route hard tasks to the stronger model and routine work to the cheaper one.

Community vote

Pick a winner in each dimension. You can change your vote any time.

Output Quality

Correctness and depth of what it produces

Agentic Ability

Tool calls, instruction-following, and multi-step tasks

Speed

Tokens per second and time-to-first-token

Value for Money

How much capability you get per dollar

Reliability

Consistent results: fewer refusals, loops and format breaks

Current Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models run on Standard Compute

Standard Compute

Current frontier models Claude Fable 5.1 · GPT-6 Astra

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