MiniMax confirmed that Space Bunny, the anonymous model that led usage rankings on OpenRouter and elsewhere, was an early version of M3.1 Flash, and launched it on its API on October 19. Pay-as-you-go pricing is $0.15 input, $0.60 output and $0.015 cache read per million tokens, with a 1M context, text, image and video input, and an effort setting for thinking depth. Per MiniMax, it costs one third of M3 and runs 3x faster, scoring 73.7% on DeepSWE and 62.2% on Automation-Bench; weights are due October 23.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Official pay-as-you-go pricing: $0.15 input / $0.60 output / $0.015 cache read per million tokens; per token that is half of M3 ($0.30/$1.20), and MiniMax does not explain how it gets one third of the cost.
- ✓Vendor benchmarks: DeepSWE v1.1 73.7% (Opus 5: 74.0%), Automation-Bench 62.2%, BabyVision with tools 91.0%, Terminal Bench 4.0 38.1% (Opus 5: 51.8%).
- ✓1M context, text/image/video input, five effort levels from low to max, default max, thinking cannot be turned off.
- ✓Weights are scheduled for October 23; the preview guide lists a MoE with 428B total and about 23B active parameters.
- ✓Migration: M2.5 and M2.7 closed to new users on October 19 and retire on November 18; M Plan and Token Plan requests now route to M3.1 Flash automatically.
Key Decision Metrics at a Glance
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Project Links & Resources
Direct AccessIn-Depth Technical Analysis
Core Background & Industry Pain Points
Flash-tier models carry most of the traffic in agents and coding tools, so developers care about price, speed and long context at the same time. M3.1 Flash had been in MiniMax Code as a preview since September 27, while an anonymous model called Space Bunny climbed usage rankings on OpenRouter and other platforms. On October 19 MiniMax confirmed Space Bunny was an early M3.1 Flash and opened pay-as-you-go API access.
Architecture Highlights & Mechanism
The docs list a 1M context, text, image and video input, and an effort parameter with five levels (low, medium, high, xhigh, max), defaulting to max; thinking cannot be disabled. The preview guide describes a MoE with 428B total and about 23B active parameters, sparse attention and a native vision encoder. MiniMax says it runs 3x faster than M3.
Benchmarks & Measured Results
All vendor figures: DeepSWE v1.1 73.7% (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash 74.2%, Opus 5 74.0%), Automation-Bench 62.2% (best in the table), BabyVision with tools 91.0%, and Terminal Bench 4.0 38.1%, well below Opus 5 at 51.8%. No independent re-test yet.
Developer Quick Start
Call model MiniMax-M3.1-Flash on platform.minimax.io at $0.15 input, $0.60 output and $0.015 cache read per million tokens, about half the per-token price of M3. If you still use M2.5 or M2.7, they are closed to new users and retire on November 18, and subscription-plan requests already route to M3.1 Flash. Open weights are scheduled for October 23.
Benchmark side-by-side against alternatives, or calculate monthly token cost vs subscription break-even.
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