What you actually get today
MiniMax H3-Image: Available now.
Is it free? Free to download and run yourself; the official pages do not confirm free online use. The weights are a free download, but the licence does not cover the US, UK, EU or South Korea.
Where to get it free:
- Hugging Face weights (MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3-Image), only where the licence applies: MiniMax-H3-Image Community License: written permission needed above US$1M yearly revenue or to host it for others (source)
| Where | Who | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| MiniMax API Platform: MiniMax-H3-Image and MiniMax-H3-Image-Highspeed | MiniMax API accounts, pay as you go | Available now | MiniMax does not say every account in this group has it. Text-to-image and editing endpoints are documented with prices. The pages we checked do not list which countries can sign up. (source) |
| Hailuo AI web app | Hailuo AI users; the plan needed is not stated | Available now | MiniMax does not say every account in this group has it. The Hailuo page says access depends on release and availability. (source) |
| MiniMax Code | MiniMax Code users; the plan needed is not stated | Available now | MiniMax does not say every account in this group has it. Named in the announcement; no H3-Image allowance stated. (source) |
| Open weights on Hugging Face | Anyone in the licence's territory: worldwide except the EU, UK, South Korea and the US | Available now | MiniMax does not say every account in this group has it. Public and not gated. Companies over US$1M yearly revenue, or anyone hosting it for others, need MiniMax's written permission. (source) |
Not included:
- A licence for the weights in the EU, UK, South Korea or the US: MiniMax asks people there to contact it (source)
- Masked edits, transparent backgrounds and preview images (API) (source)
- The 66.7 GB text encoder: it downloads separately from the MiniMax-H3 repository (source)
- Negative prompts and a choice of step count when you run the weights yourself (source)
- Regions: Weights licence: worldwide except the EU, UK, South Korea and the US. API and app regions: not stated in the MiniMax pages we checked (source)
- Price: Standard: $2.30 per million text input tokens, $1.50 per million image input tokens, $3.80 per million output image tokens (about $0.022 for a 1K image, $0.069 for 4K). Highspeed: $2.30 / $3.00 / $7.60. 50% off images of 16.6 megapixels or more until Nov 17, 2026, 16:00 UTC (source)
- Limits: 1 to 10 images per request; up to 16 reference images; 655,360 to 20,000,000 pixels; aspect ratio 1:3 to 3:1; prompts up to 32,000 characters (source)
- Tested by Kingy: Not tested by Kingy yet.
Checked against MiniMax’s own pages on Nov 11, 2026, 14:15 UTC. Rollouts change in the first days; this box is re-checked for 72 hours.
MiniMax released H3-Image on November 11, 2026: an image model for text-to-image and editing that you can call on MiniMax’s API, use in Hailuo AI, or download and run yourself. The biggest change from MiniMax’s earlier image model is size. H3-Image makes images of about 16 megapixels (4096 × 4096 at square) by default, and MiniMax says it does it in under 10 seconds. The catch most launch coverage will skip is in the licence: the free weights are not licensed for use in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union or South Korea.
What it costs per image
MiniMax charges by tokens, but its pricing page also gives example costs for one image. For the Standard model, a text-to-image request costs about $0.02179 at 1K (1024 × 1024), $0.02333 at 2K and $0.06879 at 4K (4096 × 4096). Until November 17, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, images of at least 16.6 million pixels are half price, so a 4K image costs about $0.03439.
The Highspeed model costs more for output: a 4K text-to-image example is $0.13001, or $0.06501 during the launch offer. Editing adds the cost of the reference images: one 1K reference into a 4K result is $0.07312 on Standard, and three references is $0.07914.
In plain numbers, 1,000 square 4K images on Standard come to roughly $68.79 at the normal price, or about $34.39 during launch week. MiniMax notes that real costs move with the length of your prompt, including the extra text its prompt enhancer writes.
For comparison, MiniMax’s older image-01 model is still listed at $0.0035 per image. A 1K H3-Image costs about six times that, and a 4K one about twenty times, so H3-Image is not the cheap option inside MiniMax’s own lineup. MiniMax’s announcement says its pricing is 50 to 70 percent of “comparable mainstream offerings”, but it does not name which ones.
What changed from MiniMax’s older image model
| Item | image-01 (older) | H3-Image | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price on the API | $0.0035 per image | Token-priced; about $0.022 per 1K image, $0.069 per 4K image (Standard) | MiniMax pricing |
| Largest output | Not stated on the pricing page | Up to 20,000,000 pixels per image; 4K is the default size level | MiniMax image guide |
| Reference images for editing | Not stated on the pricing page | 1 to 16 | MiniMax image guide |
| Open weights | No | Yes, under MiniMax’s own community licence | Hugging Face model card |
| Speed | Not stated | Under 10 seconds for a 4K image (vendor-reported; hardware not stated) | MiniMax announcement |
All H3-Image figures in this table are vendor-reported. MiniMax also says H3-Image has the best prompt adherence among open-weight image models. It does not publish a benchmark table for that claim on the pages Kingy checked.
The licence: free weights, four big markets left out
The weights are public on Hugging Face and not gated, under the MiniMax-H3-Image Community License, dated November 10, 2026. Its territory is “worldwide, excluding the Excluded Territories”, and it lists those as the European Union, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Korea and the United States. The licence says use outside its territory is not authorised, and it invites people in those places to contact MiniMax about a separate licence.
Inside the territory there are more conditions:
- A company (with its affiliates) earning more than US$1 million a year needs MiniMax’s prior written permission.
- So does anyone offering the model to other people as a hosted service, such as an API or website.
- Commercial products built on it must show the name “MiniMax-H3-Image” in their interface.
- Images it makes may not be used to train or improve other AI models.
The licence also says it applies to use “including through any Hosted Service”. MiniMax’s API and Hailuo pages that Kingy checked do not say whether people in the US, UK, EU or South Korea may use the hosted model, so that remains unconfirmed. This is a summary of the licence text, not legal advice; read the licence itself before you build on it.
What the download weighs
MiniMax’s own download table on the model card lists these files:
| Part | Size | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Diffusion transformer | 66.28 GB | 33.1 billion parameters, BF16 |
| Image decoder (VAE) | 2.34 GB | FP32 |
| Text encoder | 66.7 GB | Downloaded from the MiniMax-H3 repository; skipped if you already have H3 |
| Prompt expander (optional) | 17.9 GB | Separate repository, NVFP4 |
That is about 135 GB before the optional prompt expander. The model card names SGLang, vLLM-Omni, diffusers and ComfyUI as ways to run it, and lists data-centre and workstation cards such as the NVIDIA H200, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell and AMD Instinct MI350X among supported hardware. MiniMax publishes no smaller, quantized version of the image model on the pages Kingy checked. If you already run MiniMax’s H3 video model locally, the text encoder is shared, so the extra download is mostly the 66 GB transformer.
The model card adds a few practical rules: it works best around 16 megapixels, it expects a detailed English description of the whole image, and the local server rejects negative prompts and any step count other than 6. On MiniMax’s API, a prompt enhancer turns short prompts in any language into that kind of description first.
What is still unknown
- Whether people in the US, UK, EU or South Korea may use H3-Image through MiniMax’s API, Hailuo AI or MiniMax Code. The pages Kingy checked do not say.
- Which Hailuo AI or MiniMax Code plans include H3-Image, and how many images each allows.
- What hardware MiniMax used for its “under 10 seconds” 4K figure, and which “mainstream alternatives” its speed and price comparisons refer to.
- Whether it runs on a home PC or Mac at all. No speed on consumer hardware has been published, and Kingy has not measured one.
- Independent quality scores. MiniMax’s prompt-adherence claim has no published benchmark on the pages Kingy checked.
What Kingy tested
Not tested by Kingy yet. The prices, limits, file sizes and licence terms above come from MiniMax’s own pages and model card, fetched on November 11, 2026.
Sources
- MiniMax: MiniMax H3-Image announcement (November 11, 2026), fetched November 11, 2026
- MiniMax API pricing overview, fetched November 11, 2026
- MiniMax image generation guide, fetched November 11, 2026
- Hugging Face: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3-Image model card, fetched November 11, 2026
- MiniMax-H3-Image Community License Agreement, fetched November 11, 2026
- Hugging Face API: repository details, fetched November 11, 2026
- Hailuo AI: H3 Image, fetched November 11, 2026
- MiniMax Code: H3 Image, fetched November 11, 2026
Revision log
- November 11, 2026: First published, from MiniMax’s launch post, API pricing and docs, and the Hugging Face model card and licence.