The August 30 through September 13, 2026 promotion gives developers two weeks to compare MiniMax's video models through Vercel's AI Gateway at a 50% discount.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published
Primary source: MiniMax
Why it matters #
Developers already calling H3 or H3 Max through Vercel can test both models at half price without changing model IDs or application code, reducing the cost and engineering work required for a direct comparison.
MiniMax, the generative AI company founded and led by Yan Junjie, is offering H3 and H3 Max through Vercel's AI Gateway at 50% off from August 30 through September 13, 2026.
Vercel announced the promotion alongside MiniMax. The discount applies to applications already using the existing model IDs, so developers can test the models without changing their integrations.
H3 predates the sale. MiniMax introduced the model on July 31 and released its weights on August 3. Vercel's model catalog lists H3 Max with an August 27 release date.
Yan founded MiniMax after spending more than six years at SenseTime, where he became a vice president and deputy head of its research institute. He studied mathematics at Southeast University, earned an artificial-intelligence doctorate from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and conducted postdoctoral research at Tsinghua University. MiniMax's management page credits him with roughly 200 academic papers and more than 30,000 citations.
A cheaper gateway test
According to Vercel's H3 API documentation, AI Gateway handles routing and polls until a video is ready. The integration supports prompts based on text, a starting image, paired first and last frames, or image, video and audio references, with output up to 2K and clips from four to 15 seconds.
MiniMax describes H3 as a general-purpose model that can process text, images, video and audio in a unified context and generate video with native stereo sound. fal.ai's H3 Max page describes H3 Max as a high-speed option supporting text-to-video and image-to-video generation at 480p or 768p.
The model IDs remain minimax/minimax-h3
and minimax/minimax-h3-max
. Under the promotion, applications already calling those IDs receive the lower rate without code changes. Teams can compare pricing and output within an existing gateway integration, then decide whether to keep the models after September 13.