MiniMax's partners now sell its video model for half the lab's own price
On 2 October, HeyGen and Creatify both shipped video models fine-tuned from MiniMax's open H3 weights, at 1.5 to 4 cents a second against the lab's own 8-cent list. The price floor in AI video was set this week by resellers of open weights, not by the labs that train them.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
Two US launches, one Shanghai engine
On 2 October two American companies shipped video models built on someone else's weights. Creatify Labs launched Boreal-H3, an ad model "post-training MiniMax H3 in partnership with MiniMax," at $0.04 a second at 768p 1. The same day HeyGen released heygen-video-1, its first general-purpose video model, which its own documentation describes as "built on MiniMax H3 and post-trained by HeyGen," turning out 5-to-15-second clips with their own audio 23. MiniMax published the complete H3 weights for fine-tuning under a community licence in August 5.
Three cents against forty-seven
At regular rates, the new H3 resellers sit at 3 to 4 cents a second at 768p. MiniMax's own API lists at 8 cents, Google's Veo 3.1 Lite at 5 cents at 720p, and Seedance 2.5 at roughly 47 cents 124. HeyGen's 1.5-cent launch rate runs through 31 October 2.
H3 resellers sell at 3 to 4 cents a second, half MiniMax's own 8
- Estimate
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| HeyGen Video, 768p (regular) (estimate) | 3¢ |
| Boreal-H3, 768p | 4¢ |
| MiniMax H3 list, 768p | 8¢ |
| Veo 3.1 Fast, 720p | 10¢ |
| Veo 3.1, 720p | 40¢ |
| Seedance 2.5 (Creatify's figure) (estimate) | 47¢ |
The lab's partners sell under its own list price
MiniMax Group listed in Hong Kong in January and closed 2025 with $79.0 million of revenue against a $1.87 billion net loss 6. Open weights bought the lab distribution through partners like these; the same release turns its 8-cent list price into a ceiling those partners now sell under 15. Any per-second video revenue modeled at frontier rates now has a 4-cent substitute underneath it.
The benchmark grades itself
The quality case is Creatify's own exam: 133.3 for Boreal-H3 against H3's 100 on its Ads Quality Index, scored by judges Creatify validated itself 1. The release concedes the scores measure ad quality before launch, not whether the ads convert 1. HeyGen's headline price is a sale, and its regular rate comes through a single trade report 2.
Watch 1 November
The tell is 1 November, when HeyGen's launch rate expires and its 768p price roughly doubles 2. The question for MiniMax is whether it cuts its own list or lets partners own the cheap tier. Open weights bought MiniMax an ecosystem; the invoice is a ceiling on its own API.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
