MiniMax H3

MiniMax H3 (aka Hailuo 3.0 / 海螺3) is a real, newly released omni-modal video model from MiniMax, a Chinese AI lab, launched 2026-07-31 (minimax.io/blog/minimax-h3). minimaxh3.art is not MiniMax's site. It is a third-party wrapper that puts the model behind its own signup, credit system, and Stripe checkout. The operator states this directly on its own About page: "Public project identity: github.com/bbwdadfg/minimaxh3" and that repo's README says "Independent third-party AI video studio... not affiliated with MiniMax, Hailuo AI, or their official products/APIs." The GitHub repo itself has 0 stars, 0 forks, and exists mainly to host that disclaimer and one blog post — it is not a real open-source project, just a citation anchor. The same template (identical copy, layout, countdown banner, and pricing structure) is running on at least five other domains (minimaxh3.ai, minimaxh3.info, minimaxh3.app, minimaxh3.co, minimaxh3.org) found via search, which is consistent with a templated SEO operation running several near-identical storefronts on the same model rather than one product with a distinct identity.

According to MiniMax's own launch post, H3 jointly understands and generates across text, image, video, and audio in one pass: it accepts up to 9 reference images, 3 video clips, and 3 audio clips (12 files total) and can transfer camera movement from a reference video, a face from a reference image, and a voice from a reference clip into one new shot — MiniMax's own example prompt does exactly this. Output is native 2K, 24fps, up to 15 seconds, with generated stereo audio (dialogue, SFX, atmosphere) rather than a separate TTS/sound-design pass. Hailuo AI's own product page (MiniMax's consumer app) claims H3 ranked #1 in Video Editing with Audio, #2 in Text-to-Video with Audio, and #3 in Image-to-Video with Audio on the Artificial Analysis Video Arena as of 2026-07-31 — I could not independently confirm this against the leaderboard (the specific URL returned 404 on the date of this check), so treat it as a vendor claim, not a verified ranking. The model's open weights are real and substantial: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3 is on Hugging Face with 4.5M+ likes-weighted downloads and an active third-party ecosystem (ComfyUI nodes, LoRAs, turbo/distilled variants from lightx2v and others), confirming genuine community uptake beyond marketing.

MiniMax calls H3 an "open model," but the Hugging Face license field reads license:other / minimax-h3-community-license-agreement — a MiniMax-authored community license, not a standard OSI-approved license (Apache/MIT). It's also not a full release: the Hugging Face card states that H3-Context-IR (prompt understanding) and H3-Regenerate-2K (the actual 2K upscale step) are hosted-only and "not included in this open-source release" — what you can self-host is the 768p H3-Base checkpoint; native 2K requires MiniMax's own API.

minimaxh3.art publishes real numbers: credits cost 1/s at 480p, 2/s at 768p, 3/s at 2K (verified on /pricing, 2026-08-28). Subscriptions run $19.92–$63.92/mo (annual, billed yearly) or $24.90–$79.90/mo (monthly), and one-time credit packs run $9.90–$59.90 and never expire. Doing the arithmetic from the site's own numbers, its cheapest annual plan (Starter) works out to about $0.0055/credit, so a 5s 2K clip (15 credits) costs roughly $0.083 — but the entry-level one-time pack works out closer to $0.021/credit, or about $0.31 for the same clip. For comparison, Hailuo AI's own pricing page (hailuoai.video, MiniMax's consumer app) states H3 2K costs about $0.073–$0.120 per second directly from MiniMax, i.e. roughly $0.37–$0.60 for 5 seconds — so minimaxh3.art's subscription tiers land at or below that range but its casual one-time packs land well above it. There is no visible way to use H3 through this site without an account and credits; there is no free unlimited tier, only "free credits on sign-in" of unstated size.

No company name, business address, or legal entity appears anywhere on minimaxh3.art — not in the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, or About page (all checked 2026-08-28). Contact is a single address, [email protected]. The Terms of Service state generation quality and 'model behavior can vary' and disclaim liability broadly; the Refund Policy is written largely for an image-generation product ("AI outputs vary by image quality, font complexity, and prompt" appears verbatim on a page for a video tool), suggesting boilerplate reused across the operator's other storefronts rather than content written specifically for this product. Payment is processed through Stripe, which gives some fraud protection regardless of the operator's anonymity, but there is no named party a buyer could pursue outside of a chargeback.

The homepage and pricing page both display a "Limited Time Offer... Ends in 30:00:00" banner. Two separate fetches of the site, minutes apart, both showed the identical "30:00:00" value — evidence the countdown is not actually counting down and the urgency is manufactured rather than tied to a real, expiring promotion.