MiniMax H3 Max: 768p AI Video From $0.50 a Clip

Short version: MiniMax H3 Max makes 5 to 15 second clips at 480p or 768p. On Leaxor a five-second clip is $0.50 at 480p and $0.80 at 768p, with no subscription required and credits that never expire. There is no 1080p tier, which is the one thing that might rule it out for you.

Disclosure: Leaxor is mine and runs this model. Every price below is what we charge, and we charge close to what it costs us.

What the model does

MiniMax is the lab behind the Hailuo video models, which have been quietly good for a while without ever being the loudest thing in the field. H3 Max sits at the top of its H3 line and arrived on 26 August 2026.

The specification is deliberately narrow, and the parameters below come off the endpoint's own page:

• Resolutions: 480p and 768p. Nothing higher.
• Duration: 5 to 15 seconds, default 5.
• Aspect ratios: six, including 21:9, 16:9, 9:16 and 1:1.

Capping at 768p is a real decision rather than an oversight. For vertical short-form, 768p is close enough to what a phone displays that the difference is hard to see, and the compute saved goes into motion quality instead of pixels nobody looks at.

What a clip costs here

Credits are $0.10 each. Minimum purchase is 50 credits, which is $5, and they do not expire.

Worth being plain about the shape of that, because it is unusual. You don't need a subscription you might forget about, there is no monthly allowance that resets and disappears, and no plan tier gating the resolution. Buy five dollars of credits and you have ten clips at 480p.

The settings, and one default worth changing

Duration is 5 to 15 seconds, and the floor matters

Five seconds is the shortest clip this model will make. Several competitors start at two or three, so for very short cuts you are paying for footage you will trim away.

If most of your cuts are two-second beats, this is the wrong model regardless of how good it looks.

Six aspect ratios, which is more than most

21:9, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4 and 9:16. The default is 16:9, so anyone making vertical short-form has to change it every time or quietly generate landscape footage they then crop badly.

Prompt expansion runs in a balanced mode by default

The model rewrites your prompt before rendering. As with every model that does this, it helps thin prompts and interferes with careful ones. If a detailed prompt keeps coming back approximately right rather than right, this is the setting to look at first.

What it is actually for

Vertical short-form at a predictable price. 768p is close to what a phone displays, so the missing 1080p tier costs you very little in practice while saving real money.

Mid-length single shots. The 5 to 15 second range covers most of what a short-form cut actually uses, in one generation, with no stitching.

Work where consistency matters more than peak quality. MiniMax models have a reputation for behaving predictably across generations rather than producing occasional spectacular results and occasional nonsense. For anyone generating in volume that is worth more than a higher ceiling.

Where it is wrong: desktop or TV delivery, sub-five-second cuts, and anything needing audio.

Where it fits against the rest of the shelf

H3 Max sits in the middle and that is the honest description of it. Wan 3.0 costs the same at 480p and goes to 1080p and 30 seconds, so if you need either of those, take Wan. If you want a steady 768p workhorse and do not care about 1080p, this is a fine default.

Where H3 Max came from, and why that matters

MiniMax is not a new name in video. The Hailuo line has been in the field for a while, and it earned a specific reputation: predictable rather than spectacular.

That distinction is worth more than it sounds. Some models produce an occasional extraordinary result surrounded by unusable ones, which is fine when you are making one hero shot and expensive when you are making forty clips a week. Others land in a narrower band, and you can plan around them.

H3 Max inherits that. The output will rarely be the best thing on the shelf. It will also rarely be the thing you throw away, which for anyone generating in volume is the number that actually governs cost.

The image-to-video mode is the one to use

H3 Max ships an image-to-video endpoint alongside text-to-video, and it is the better half.

Text-to-video asks the model to invent a composition and then move it, which is two chances to get something wrong. Image-to-video takes a still you have already approved and animates it, so the only variable left is the motion.

Combined with the price, that produces a genuinely cheap workflow: generate a frame on an image model for a credit, judge it properly, then spend five to eight credits animating the one that works. You are paying video prices only for motion, never for composition.

Anyone generating video from text alone, on any model, is paying to re-roll decisions that a still would have settled for a tenth of the cost.

What it will not do

No 1080p. If anything you make ends up on a desktop screen or a TV, look elsewhere.

No clips under five seconds, so it is a poor fit for very short cuts where you would otherwise pay for two or three seconds.

And like every clip generator, it returns footage rather than a finished video. Script, narration, captions and continuity across shots are all still your job.

Should you use it?

Yes for vertical short-form where 768p is plenty and you want a predictable per-clip price.

No if you need 1080p, sub-five-second clips, or the cheapest possible draft — Gemini Omni Flash at 360p is $0.30.

MiniMax H3 Max and its image-to-video mode are live in Leaxor's clip generator, priced per render with credits at $0.10, no subscription required and no expiry. The full shelf with every model's per-clip price is in the cost breakdown, and the August roundup covers what else shipped this month.

Reading this with an AI assistant? Ask it to summarize this in ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity.