MiniMax M3.1 Flash cuts prices to match DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
MiniMax M3.1 Flash cuts input and output prices by over 50% and claims a 70% drop in agentic task cost; the post says it is roughly level with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on DeepSWE in both performance and price.
MiniMax just shipped M3.1 Flash. Input and output prices are both down more than 50% from M3. MiniMax says the all-in cost of running agentic tasks falls 70%. The rival is DeepSeek. Two days earlier, DeepSeek pushed out V4.1 Flash 1017. On the DeepSWE coding benchmark, the two models are now roughly level on both performance and price. Both companies are fighting hard over the Flash tier because that is where usage is moving. On OpenRouter, the share of usage going to the 10 highest-quality models fell from 55% in Q1 last year to 14% in Q3 this year. The Flash tier is also MiniMax's core business. In the first half, Open Platform and enterprise services brought in more than 60% of revenue. Company-wide gross margin was only 17.9%, so MiniMax has little margin to give up. That makes it unlikely the price cut is funded out of margin. The all-in cost fell more than the per-token price did, and inference now runs nearly 3x faster. The difference comes from inference efficiency. The Flash price war is decided by the cost of each unit of inference. Only the players that lower that cost fastest can afford to keep cutting prices.