u/Ssj273

Hey everyone, just wanted to drop a warning here because I just got completely burned by MiniMax's new $20 "Plus" token plan. They are aggressively marketing this right now as a killer Claude Pro alternative, claiming you get roughly 1.7 Billion tokens a month. Sounds insane on paper, right?

Well, turns out it is a massive billing trap.

To give you some background, I use OpenCode as my agentic coding harness in VS Code. I actually first ran into issues with that widespread Anthropic endpoint bug where cached tokens were getting counted twice. I heard that bug finally got resolved today, but to bypass it earlier, I had set up a workaround. I routed my MiniMax key through an OpenRouter BYOK setup and then threw the OpenRouter key into OpenCode.

After doing this workaround, my token usage reduced a lot because OpenRouter has great sticky routing and response caching. My cache hits are now always upwards of 95% which is awesome, so I was fully expecting that the massive caching discounts from MiniMax's PAYG (pay-as-you-go) plan would apply to my subscription pool too.

But nope. On the Token Plan, PROMPT CACHING DOES NOT EXIST.

Every single token, whether it is a fresh input, an output, or a piece of code the agent has already read 50 times in the same session, is counted exactly the same. It all drains from that 1.7B pool at full flat-rate value. Because agentic workflows multi-scan your entire project history on every single turn, it means most of my tokens are kinda wasted.

This plan can actually be really good for heavy, traditional API workflows where you send distinct, one-off stateless requests. But for agentic workflows where context loops repeatedly, it is a complete bait-and-switch. This is actually a cheap but good quality model, but the token plan itself is highly misleading. They show you cheap API cache rates to get you excited, but their subscription token plan treats all context like a brand new cold prompt. Save your twenty bucks, the plan is fundementally flawed for agent workflows.

Just wanted to drop a quick warning because I just got burned by MiniMax’s new $20 Token Plan Plus (the one promising 1.7 billion tokens). If you're thinking of using it as a cheaper alternative to Claude Code or Aider limits, stay away for now.

I bought the plan literally yesterday. I’ve been vibe coding a single project normally using the official OpenCode extension inside the Antigravity IDE. No automated script chains, no crazy uncontrolled loops, just normal, manual multi-turn chat. In less than 36 hours, my account balance dropped by roughly 300 million tokens.

I was losing my mind trying to figure out how that's even possible, so I downloaded the raw CSV billing logs. Get this: in a single one-hour window yesterday, the API billed me for over 14.3 MILLION input tokens under cache-read on MiniMax-M3-512k.

Here is what's actually happening under the hood:

1. Their compatibility endpoints are completely broken. When your IDE extension or terminal agent sends standard prompt caching instructions, MiniMax’s backend completely ignores them. Instead of giving you a massive cache discount like Claude does, it double-counts and multi-scans your entire project history on every single turn. It basically charges you full price to re-read your own code over and over again.
2. They are silently auto-routing your traffic. Looking at my logs, the backend is intercepting baseline initialization pings from the extension and forcing them onto MiniMax-M2.7 without me ever selecting it, which completely breaks any predictable context tracking.
3. Their first-party Mac app is total garbage. To make things worse, I tried using their official MiniMax Code desktop app to see if it handled things better, and it takes minutes just to open. The lag is insane, I haven't seen a Mac app perform this badly in years.

To top it all off, I tried sending a strongly worded complaint to their standard support and API emails listed on their documentation, and the emails literally bounced straight back. Their internal support infrastructure is an absolute black hole right now.

With Claude Code, I sometimes couldnt even finish my weekly limits because Anthropic actually handles cache reads properly, and it's infinitely faster. MiniMax's current translation layer will literally incinerate a 1.7B pool in a few days just doing light vibe coding.

I'm trying to track down a working engineering contact or a dev ticket to demand a full quota reset because their backend tracking is completely broken. Until they fix how their endpoints handle prompt caching for developer tools, save your twenty bucks and stick to CLaude Code for coding and native OpenRouter or Anthropic keys for API work.