MiniMax-M3.1-Flash: pricing, context and performance

What you need to know

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is a language model from MiniMax, released on October 19, 2026. It is a very recent release. It is a closed model: you access it through an API, from MiniMax or one of the 19 providers listed on models.dev. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money.

We file it under budget models (24 models in this category on the site).

What do independent benchmarks say?

As of October 22, 2026, Epoch AI publishes no score for MiniMax-M3.1-Flash on our basket's benchmarks. To place it, rely on its specifications and price, then test it on your own cases.

At MiniMax, the best-scoring model we track is MiniMax-M3, with an index of 55.5.

What it can do

Its context window reaches 1,000,000 tokens, roughly 1,500 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough to load a whole book or a mid-sized codebase. A single answer can run to 524,288 tokens.

It accepts as input: text, image and video.

It can call tools (functions, APIs), which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

Pricing and budget

MiniMax-M3.1-Flash costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens (developer's price, checked on October 22, 2026).

To put it in perspective: reading 20,000 tokens (about thirty pages) and writing 2,000 costs roughly $0.004; a thousand of those tasks, $4.2.

That is 1.9 times cheaper than the median output price of budget models ($1.13).

Tokens read back from cache cost $0.015 per million, which helps an agent that keeps resending the same context.

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

When to choose it

Given its category, MiniMax-M3.1-Flash is mainly aimed at high volumes where every cent counts: sorting, information extraction, summaries, simple assistants.

Its very large context window makes it worth considering for analysing large sets of documents in a single request.

Its very low cost (under half a cent for our sample task) means it can be called thousands of times a day.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Comparable models

In the same category, the models closest to MiniMax-M3.1-Flash are:

• GPT-6 Luna (OpenAI, index 80.3)
• Mercury 2.5 (Inception, $0.75 per million output tokens)
• Seed 2.0 Lite (ByteDance Seed, $0.76 per million output tokens)
• Qwen3.5 Flash (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 62.6)