MiniMax's new agent model matches DeepSeek's cheapest price, but its weights are not out yet
On 19th Oct'26, the Chinese lab MiniMax released M3.1 Flash, a faster and cheaper update to the M3 model it launched in June, aimed at running agents. It costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, is available through MiniMax's API, its subscription plan and its desktop coding app, and accepts prompts of up to a million tokens. MiniMax says agent tasks cost 70% less than on its previous model but has not said how it measured that, and it will release the open weights later, with no licence stated yet. An early build ran anonymously on OpenRouter from late September.
What it actually means
The input price matches DeepSeek's Flash at its off-peak rate, and after DeepSeek's five-hour outage on 15th Oct'26 that is the useful part, because a second cheap model in the same price band is the kind of fallback we suggested testing on 19th Oct'26. The 70% saving is MiniMax measuring against its own older model with no method published, so treat it as a reason to try the model rather than a number to budget on.
The weights are the catch. Teams pick Chinese open models partly because they can run them on their own servers, and until MiniMax publishes the weights and a licence, M3.1 Flash is an API you send your data to. Run it on a real agent task through a router before making it the fallback for anything that touches customer data.
A second cheap model is only a fallback once you have tested it on your own work.
Source: SiliconANGLE · Tuesday, 20 October 2026