Is MiniMax M3.1 Flash actually cheaper than GPT-4o mini?

No — as of October 2026, both charge identical list prices of $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens on their official APIs. Neither has a pricing advantage; any cost difference in practice would come from differences in token efficiency or third-party hosting markups.

Which model has a bigger context window?

MiniMax M3.1 Flash offers a 1,000,000-token context window, while GPT-4o mini supports around 128,000 tokens. If your use case involves very long documents, codebases, or extended conversations, MiniMax M3.1 Flash's larger window is a meaningful practical advantage even though the prices match.

How much would 100M input and 30M output tokens cost per month?

For both models: 100M input tokens at $0.15/M equals $15.00, plus 30M output tokens at $0.60/M equals $18.00, for a total of $33.00 per month. Since pricing is identical, this workload costs exactly the same on either model.

Are there cheaper ways to access either model?

Yes, third-party platforms sometimes undercut official list prices. Some OpenRouter hosts have offered MiniMax M3.1 Flash input pricing as low as $0.09 per million tokens, so it's worth comparing official API pricing against aggregator marketplaces before committing to a provider.

HEAD-TO-HEAD · BUDGET-TIER · VERIFIED OCTOBER 25, 2026

MiniMax M3.1 Flash vs GPT-4o mini — which is actually cheaper?

MiniMax M3.1 Flash and GPT-4o mini are priced identically at $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens. On raw pricing alone, there's no winner — the real differentiators are context window size and the workloads each model is built for.

Spec	MiniMax M3.1 Flash	GPT-4o mini
Input / 1M tokens	$0.15	$0.15
Output / 1M tokens	$0.60	$0.60
Context window	1M	128K

The output price gap

There is no output price gap here — both models charge exactly $0.60 per million output tokens, a 4x multiple over their shared $0.15 input rate. Since output tokens typically cost more to generate than input tokens cost to process, this pricing structure rewards workloads that lean on compact prompts with longer generated responses, but neither model has an edge over the other on this axis.

Context window

This is where the two diverge sharply. MiniMax M3.1 Flash ships with a 1,000,000-token context window, positioning it for large codebases, long documents, or extended agent sessions in a single request. GPT-4o mini's context window is 128K tokens, which covers most everyday chat, summarization, and lightweight coding tasks but requires chunking for very large inputs. If your workload involves ingesting large files or long conversation histories without retrieval tricks, MiniMax M3.1 Flash's larger window is the more practical fit despite matching pricing.

Worked example

At 100M input tokens and 30M output tokens per month, both models land at the exact same cost since pricing is identical. Input cost: 100M tokens × $0.15/M = $15.00. Output cost: 30M tokens × $0.60/M = $18.00. Total: $15.00 + $18.00 = $33.00/month for MiniMax M3.1 Flash, and $33.00/month for GPT-4o mini. The bill is a tie — the deciding factor for this workload will be context window needs, latency, and task-specific quality rather than price.

Prices from the LLM Price Watch daily tracker, 2026-10-25. Prices change; use the calculator with your own usage for an exact comparison, or see the full price table for every tracked model.