Two weeks after launch, from an implicit price increase to a price drop, MiniMax was forced by developers to get a 50% permanent discount

Comparative news, according to monitoring, when opening the latest billing document on the MiniMax open platform, the price of the flagship model MiniMax-M3 has been marked with a permanent 50% discount in red. Under the standard pay-as-you-go model, the price of millions of tokens entered within 512k tokens was directly reduced from $0.60 to $0.30, and the output dropped from $2.40 to $1.20. Even with extremely long contextual inputs over 512k tokens, the price was cut in half at the same time. Behind the big price cut was a serious crisis of trust that occurred less than half a month ago. When MiniMax launched the M3 model on June 1, the original pay-per-use billing was forcibly cut into token billing and the subscription rights of old users were reduced in disguise. As a result, many developers discovered that the cost of using the interface skyrocketed by more than 250% overnight. Faced with widespread complaints from communities such as V2EX, and a group of users flocking to the Black Cat Complaint Platform to defend their rights, the parent company Xiyu Technology was forced to quickly issue an apology letter on the evening of June 2 to reset user quotas and provide additional compensation. However, the compensation announcement did not completely stop the loss of developers. Under the fierce siege of the price war in the domestic big model market, in particular, competitors such as DeepSeek continued to use extremely low prices. MiniMax finally chose to completely compromise on June 15, that is, just two weeks after the release of the M3 model, and permanently cut the price in half. The big model's sharp reversal from quietly rising prices to struggling to survive reflects the passivity of startups in terms of pricing power and commercialization strategies. Although price trade-offs have stabilized developers for the time being, they have raised chain concerns in the secondary capital market. Goldman Sachs pointed out that aggressive price cuts will seriously eat up profit margins, thereby lowering MiniMax's target price by 14%. J.P. Morgan also downgraded the rating and directly pointed out that the rapid price reduction after the release of the new model often represents a sign that the model's actual ability falls short of expectations. In this Hong Kong stock matchmaking transaction where they bought Smart Spectrum and shorted MiniMax, investors have clearly turned their backs on the other side.