u/TinyAres

The output is not bad, and the most generous interpretation i can give it that its claude optimized, and m3 is not like claude, so i think it's more throughput and "feature" focused, as if you check terminal bench even fable falls below gpt 5.5 despite being better, but most of all m3 is not a viber, so perhaps claude works better in it, but it doesn't set m3 up for success.

Now you might rightfully say duh but their docs recommend using claude despite sucking, but they also made their own harness which I have not tried cause its not on linux, the overwhelmingly number 1 developer platform and easiest to release to, which is implies that those gui things are second rate at best noob traps, like all the others. I could understand their motivation cause you make a model, then people use it under suboptimal conditions, then report below its capability, but of course you reported above it on release day. Honestly for serious work you are not going to have a different harness for different models, unless its all you use which is again unlikely for serious work, so my point you just have to live with whatever self imposed penalties, and suggesting subpar options doesn't help.

I give the claude harness a 7/10, feels magic til you see the results.

1. SSS
   1. Mimo 2.5
      1. The usage you get out of this thing is nuts, you could spam billions of tokens a day without giving a single f, and its a great worker too and multimodal. Even if mimo 2.5 pro was price matched it would still fall below this absolute trooper.
2. S
   1. M3
      1. With the token plan you get a good amount of use, and the lowest hallu rate means we are making steady progress all the time, which is such a breath of fresh air compared to the either they can do it or not and back and forth you get with most when they are challenged.

I am not doing an entire tierlist for sure but also anything that doesn't give a good amount of use is effectively disqualified, or at most relegated to situational use. The strongest argument can be made for glm 5.2 for very demanding styling needs as both my picks are only good at it at, but outside top claude or glm you wouldn't get a meaningful improvement.

https://www.designarena.ai/leaderboard/code

Other argument can be made for a smarter unblocker or planner if needed, but still your choice would be a gpt sub or glm 5.2 in go / zai sub. Claude and gemini doesnt support integrating and they are worse value too, and others don't offer a big enough upgrade to justify it, but if you have very demanding intelligence needs constantly with clear roi then I guess the big codex and claude subs would be your choice. Most you have heard of don't have a model problem, they simply need a competitive deal against the best offers on the market. Currently almost no one makes their deal better or after they made it worse as a correction, but in general they stay the course and usually the release of a new model is dunk day, and say that their new guy is few percent away from top 1, then week later we see that it's not, so seemingly these 100 dollar lemonade stands are still more driven by investor hopes than market realities.

I like the plugin ecosystem but after using them and especially with ai, even with trying to evaluate them with ai, what i am really coming down on that we do have options but are they good, are they updated, do they work well with others? This does impose a cost on the user.

If you check the goal plugins, top guys

narumitw/pi-goal - most popular, simple, but updated

pi-codex-goal - it is following an established strategy which is a pro cause you dont know what you get otherwise, but its better for shorter task lists, and perhaps this guy is the best opportunity to talk about the concern i have for pi. This doesnt have questions or todos, while greatly benefiting from both, so if you add it alone then it might just do one thing while guessing everything. Perhaps the previous guy is much better too with the right setup but what is that, and still which one to use.

pi-goal-x - broken styling, perhaps need markdown to display it, often auto starts sessions, seems to bloat context, can spin and burn ton of tokens, but quality wise and approach wise seems strong. This does have questions built in, which again raises concern, so its built with the mindset that pi is naked so i must bring all that is needed, and this is a very common theme they need it or greatly benefit from it so add it in their own way instead of reusing some unified way, or dont add it and they look like crap or linking you to their preferred one kind of trying to set up a standard library.

Then you go looking for others, some dont even have repos, and most are just I made dozens of commits weeks/months ago, stared my own repo then pumped it, and I am still talking about the 3-4 digit montly downloads here. This is the least of my concern, but if you are unhappy with the top 3 will these guys deliver? Maybe its not even their problem but they are not set up to succeed, but what do they need to success? Yet most of all "works" is not good enough, you want the best.

Now pi certainly works better for more self contained plugins, but for this? I certainly would love to hear your strategies.

With the caching fix minimax is reporting 99.8% cache rate, instead of 0.28% without it.

https://preview.redd.it/a133szin478h1.png?width=1517&format=png&auto=webp&s=5f97622a74572d8ddd0367ff93edced76a3c32f7

https://preview.redd.it/5rrp9jeb578h1.png?width=1387&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6a5b22d849d2dc22df669f962194dfc57aa5f31

https://pi.dev/packages/pi-minimax-m3-caching-fix

https://preview.redd.it/r7j9vrg5a78h1.png?width=802&format=png&auto=webp&s=22e5a7db1c251e697cd26ce5d7ddf471ec62a84e

So it's effectively a free payment tier upgrade, but keep mind that thinking is output tokens and every thinking tier doubles the amount used and their input cache is 20% instead of 10% standard or 1% that mimo and deepseek has.

https://preview.redd.it/8o6mlgt2b78h1.png?width=978&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b1dc9add11f69f7d8cf091f7a0b346b6c0766f5

Therefore M3 makes the most sense to be used on high. These numbers are all assuming the cache rate reported.

10% off voucher

Of course the base version is already matched, but many others have matched both prices with their various credit bonuses, in fact opencode is the only one I know that has this odd contradiction.

Deepseek and mimo have a pro and a base/flash model with identical business strategy, and now m3 is kind of like a pro, but m2.7 is getting beaten by mimo 2.5 in the opencode sub for use and quality. Stepfun 3.7 flash entered the market too, aiming for the same pie.

They can even be lazy and quantize m3 to fp8 and cut it to 200k context then call it flash.

You can argue no model is great at it, but first of all the sub limits you to 512k context and if you go over then most likely you error cause official context is 1mil so you need to manually reduce it to 500k, but I would argue that is not nearly enough. At 300-350k?? it goes crazy but not as a fact but as an ever increasing likelyhood, and here i am not even considering output quality. Now of course you would normally have lower context, I know that but I was testing.

256k probably would be the maximum sensible choice for it or 200k as the better default option, which option was chosen to feature it in opencode. You can argue price consideration, but the use was so insignificant that the best guess is that they believe that 200k is what makes the model look the best, but also just makes it look like a slightly smarter m2.7.

I try to be as objective as possible based on the current market.

Minimax m2.7 both payg and sub wise are not worth it, deepseek flash v4 arguably but mimo 2.5 definitely killed it. You can get opencode go for 5 first month then 10 per month for 150k better requests, and their sub can be used up in 4 5 hour windows in a month, while to do the same in minimax you would need to use up 40 5 hour windows. Yet even if you did it, it is 150k reqs of better mimo 2.5 for 5$/10$ vs 180k reqs of m2.7 for 20$. This is not a new development, in fact they made their deal slightly worse by cutting the free gen ai use, but you can also use your quota to use more of it so overall I would say that is a positive.

Minimax m3 is clearly better but using it means that you take a 3x?? cut in your quotas, but it wouldn't matter anyway so you do it, and sub wise its solidish but payg wise weak considering the efficient 1-2% cache of mimo and deepseek. Competition wise the claude deal sucks, gemini deal sucks, qwen with the alibaba deal sucks, glm too. Kimi k2.6 with its variuos providers, Deepseek V4 pro, Mimo 2.5 pro and Codex with GPT 5.5 and its various thinking levels would be the competition for it. The most current threat is mimo and deepseek matching their pro api price in open code wich would immediately make them least twice as good of a deal as minimax plus, but gpt 5.5 medium is no slouch. Kimi provider offers 20x?? credits for 40 sub, and fireworks also has a currently early access sub for 50 that effectively doesn't come with a limit, but it does have some undisclosed limit.

My crystall ball says that the market will force them to offer the same 4500 use of m3 they do for m2.7, while keeping their 40 5 hour window system, that presumably greatly reduces utilization in practice, but still can be used to tempt in the users.

I think they need to commit to this gym sub platform angle, it's by far their most competitive play.

So https://platform.minimax.io/console/usage

https://preview.redd.it/q54w6716lo4h1.png?width=1607&format=png&auto=webp&s=5e4618ce4eb84e9e60f6296161f574f64f724727

My rest of the page is empty, and previously it showed 0/100 weekly limit, and I subbed before they added weeklies. It also started me off with 40k credits but those fly fast after my usage ran out which makes me suspect that I am on 1500 reqs per 5 hours, least when using m3 so it has 3x the request cost, and that 10k credits ~$10 I managed to burn in less than an hour. Which makes sense considering minimax while priced close input output wise to deepseek, they didn't adopt the 1% input cache which makes them 2x+ the cost even with now being half off, and will be 4-5x when they go to full.

The question, is there like a hidden or not so hidden token limit on me, cause if so then legacy bonus is literally pointless. Also you can't use vouchers for refills, only for api calls, but refills pay api prices? This just seems like an oversight.

The usage section also previoulsy showed other possible uses, but they just don't exist anymore like picture, music and tts, and the mmx-cli shows zero quota, but their api probably works, just a little unclear and probably all consume the same quota in unspecified ways, but the mmx-cli was pre hooked up, so hopefully they didn't kill it, but merely updating it.

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro

https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m3

Also here is my voucher for those who want 10% off https://platform.minimax.io/subscribe/token-plan?code=76iAwKMWp6&source=link

Extra thoughts later:

I wonder if this is all, maybe they didn't change as much?? only the marketing guy is on all the drugs scaring everyone with the puny tokens that may reflect average use but not potential use and also obviously inflated requests per day, literally impossible with the 5 hour limit. So what if both the tokens and the reqs per day are just useless, the only solid information is requests per 5 hours, which is seemingly 4500 for m2.7 and 1500 for m3.

Which would make the current deal the same as before, with the perk that you can also call m3, and their image, voice and music gen also consume tokens from the same pool instead of just saying you can get 50 images per day, which is pro if you want more of that, but overall you just get less, but they were more like teasers before, so I would say the current approach for these extras would be better except for the lack of transparency of cost.

Most recent information:

https://platform.minimax.io/docs/token-plan/migration

The short version is that your m2.7 use remains the same, m3 consumes 3x from the same pool, and all the ai gen features use the same pool too.

The migration is actually reasonable. After I figured out what is going on I am happy to remain a sub, but it was very poorly commicated.

They should just cut the estimated monthly tokens and daily coding calls line from their pricing page, and put the requests at the top clearly showing how much m2.7 and m3 you get per 5 hours, and least put the other ai gen ratios in the docs.

https://platform.minimax.io/subscribe/token-plan

Initial post:

So my best effort after a lot of reading would be that they are claiming that new plan is ~360000 reqs per month at assumed 50k toks per call and ~1.7 billion toks total, but multiplying those numbers gives you 18 billion, so perhaps they are assuming caching? Halving it to 180k with avg 100k context and caching sounds more like it if we bump their tokens estimate 5x. They also added in the reference to show how much the old plan sucked??, albeit it technically had 4500 requests per 5 hours. If not an old reference then makes no sense cause they are claiming more calls per day than the supposed reference could do, unless we consider higher context so assuming 100k context on average then I would still need to consume 4 windows, if 150k context then ~3 would do it.

The monthly tokens seem like the most explicit info here, but not entirely sure cause if you see their estimates ultra promises 10x the calls for 6x the price but also having 5x the tokens? Not like those are specified as special M3 tokens, in fact the reference explicitly says that 2.7 shares quota with 3, I guess just don't call 2.7 then. Max would be 2.5x price for 3x toks and 3x calls, sounds obvious, but then ultra?? The only explenation I have is that making you pay a 20% premium for something that would be shared in a team anyway, therefore higher utilization, as it says team workloads, but the requests don't match the tokens unlike on previous tiers so now what is truth?

They killed the old 10 plan and the fast plans, and they also seemingly killed the mmx cli, I just tried it and shows zero quota, presumably they want the minimax code desktop thing, and i just found it and it's only for mac and windows? Well I am on linux so hopefully mmx is not dead, just in a coma, but api calls might work too.

I also got 40k extra credits in my existing 20$ plan which they assume to be 40 dollar worth of value basically ~40$ api, albeit plan says nothing of it.

Assuming face value

Previously plus limit was 180k reqs per month = ~18 billion

Now 1.6 wich is 12x drop

Max was 600k reqs = ~60 billion toks

Max now 5 which is 12x drop again

Hourly req window was 4500, now 1500, 3x drop.

Considering there is no talk of estimated calls on the token plan page its clear that tokens are the real currency here, with 5 hourly windows.

To be entirely fair the model is better and minimax 2.7 was sliding into free tier level, so I would cautiously call this an improvement, and will say more after like a week of experience with it, but I think they cut too hard, and made the plus the starter and max the plus, and they are payg pricing the new guy 2x the old guy, but lowered quota 12x, or 6x if you want to count in their pricing of the model.

Edit: Since I made this topic they 3x the 5 hourly limit so went from 1500 to 4500 and the supposed daily calls from 11000 to 34000 on plus, but effectively what really matters is the tokens, those are going to be your real limitation, this just means you can use your quota faster.

Intelligence wise the model looks promising it fixed and found bugs over the capability of googles models, and all open source models, so seems like only the better claudes and gpts beat it.

https://platform.minimax.io/subscribe/token-plan?tab=individual

https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-token-plan

https://platform.minimax.io/subscribe/token-plan?tab=individual

https://platform.minimax.io/subscribe/token-plan

https://www.minimax.io/

Also here is my voucher for those who want 10% off https://platform.minimax.io/subscribe/token-plan?code=76iAwKMWp6&source=link

Even if you go into the ai studio and make sure the thinking is highest and the temp is zero and safety is zero, that you need to make sure cause by default they keep turning it down, and you can't set defaults gemini is getting me the worst results. I have tested it against other major models, albeit western models more share it's style.

Yet it comes last not becuse its dumb, I had other ais contradict me and be very wrong and most of all sloppy, while gemini is kind of sloppy too, but super "validating" to the point of ridicolousness, my last idea is always the best idea, and the last thing is always the best thing. I wouldn't even say it's a pleasent conversation, cause I could just play affirmation messages instead on a loop, while actually getting some useful information to act on instead of getting mislead. Now at the moment you might like it, but not later.

But it's not just me, gemini also hypes itself, so while if it has a direct task its intelligence shines, but if it keeps going it's not very critical of itself, albeit I would say that for coding it's closer to being "normal" especially if success is not measured by vibe but checks, but you are still talking to it. It's not configured I would say to deliver quality output primarily, but to be used by you so adoption and revenue. It's the guy at the work who long since figured out that the only right thing to say to the bigger wigs is hell yeah, and if what they asked for sucked then it's their fault, but also you don't care, you are paid by hour and you sure do act like it.

Honestly it's hard to say cause lets be realistic here, one outcome that the user appreciates critical feedback and perhaps they can find out which users have this preference, and the second one would be that they get pissed and perhaps seek a more aggreable option. You probably don't want an ai boyfriend who just constantly tells you that you are stupid and wrong, even though is true, but that is exactly my kink. It's not even acting like a human cause almost no human acts so sychophantic unless you pay them for it, but acting like a human is not a obvious goal anyway.