MiniMax M3.1 Flash in practice: tests and comparisons with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

MiniMax confirms Space Bunny was an early M3.1 Flash, priced at $0.15 input and $0.60 output per million tokens, and that it processed about 56.7 trillion tokens anonymously on OpenRouter.

A developer says they had been sleeping on open coding models, using MiniMax M3.1 Flash via OpenCode and Nebius to build and deploy a speculative decoding demo page.

A price table of the 25 most-used OpenRouter models by tokens Oct 19-25 puts MiniMax M3.1 Flash at $0.60 per 1M output tokens, level with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, across a 150x spread from $0.13 to $20.

An OpenCode daily usage chart shows DeepSeek 4.1 Flash surging since 1017, MiniMax M3.1 Flash dropping into the others bucket after its free promo ended, and GLM 5.3 Flash a distant second.

Across 13 OpenRouter endpoints, the 7 reporting exactly 205 input tokens mentioned Claude in 46% of replies versus 0.8% for the other 6; the 205 matches MiniMax's official chat template, mentions hit 90% at temperature 0, and FP4 quantization doesn't explain it, pointing to serving configuration.

After two weeks of free Space Bunny use in OpenCode for simple tasks, the author learned from MiniMax's blog that it was an early M3.1 Flash that processed over 200 trillion tokens anonymously; open weights are 428B total with 23B active per token.

The author learned the mystery model that built their fluid simulation, Space Bunny, is MiniMax M3.1 Flash; handing back a 1,564-line single file, it split it into 13 files in 18.5 minutes for $0.17 at API prices, after topping OpenCode for 12 anonymous days with 106T tokens served.

Given a prompt about a little astronaut bunny collecting fallen stars on a floating moon island, MiniMax M3.1 Flash built a playable 3D game, Moonbloom, through OpenCode with $0 spent on model usage.

The author maps Space Bunny to M3.1 Flash and regrets not trying it while it was free, saying the output quality surprised them.

MiniMax M3.1 Flash, the model previously anonymous on OpenRouter as Space Bunny, fetched 503 arXiv papers, wrote 4,000+ lines of code, self-tested and fixed bugs in an 86-minute unattended run for $0.88; the same tokens would cost about $8.46 at Claude Sonnet 5.5 pricing.

An anonymous model called Space Bunny led OpenRouter for 10 days and burned 56.7 trillion tokens before being revealed as MiniMax M3.1 Flash at $0.15 per million input tokens; the author then gave it a real job.

On OpenRouter, M3.1 Flash accepts a 1M-token multimodal context in one call at $0.15 per 1M input and $0.60 per 1M output, with MiniMax reporting gains over M3 on agentic, coding and security benchmarks.