MiniMax M3: Frontier Coding Performance at 1/40th Opus Pricing
paddo.dev·high signal
MiniMax launched M3 on June 1 at $0.12/M input tokens on their platform vs Opus 4.7's $5 — a 40x cost reduction. M3 scores 59% on SWE-bench Pro (edging GPT-5.5's 58.6%) and 83.5 on BrowseComp (surpassing Opus 4.7's 79.3), with a 1M-token context window. Available on Ollama Cloud and OpenRouter with OpenAI-compatible endpoints. paddo.dev cautions these are vendor benchmarks published on launch day and recommends practical testing over trusting day-one claims.