MiniMax H3 (Hailuo 3): Open Weights, 2K Video and a License Catch

What MiniMax released

• July 30: teaser under #MiniMaxH3.
• July 31: API and app launch of H3 / Hailuo 3.
• August 3: weights published for H3-Base. The Context-IR component and the 2K regeneration step stay closed and API-side.

Open weights from a top-tier video lab are rare: OpenAI, Google and Kuaishou keep their video models closed. That makes H3 notable even with its restrictions, next to fully open families such as Alibaba's Wan and Lightricks' LTX.

Why the license matters

"Open weights" does not mean you can run H3 anywhere. The license excludes local deployment in the US, EU, UK and South Korea. If your company or servers are in those regions, self-hosting H3 is off the table, and so is fine-tuning it on your own hardware there. Researchers and companies elsewhere can download and run H3-Base, but they still do not get the closed 2K regeneration step that produces the headline output quality.

For most product teams the conclusion is the same as before the release: use H3 through an API.

What H3 is good at

• Physics: MiniMax built its reputation on believable motion. Objects fall with the right weight, cloth and hair react to movement, liquids behave like liquids.
• Sound in the same pass: dialogue, effects and ambience are generated with the picture, so a skateboard landing sounds when it lands.
• Flexible length: clips run from a few seconds up to 15, longer than the fixed 8 seconds of Veo 3.

Pricing

MiniMax's own platform and aggregators such as OpenRouter list H3 at about $0.13 per second of video output, with reference images billed separately (around $0.04 each after the first five). A 10-second clip therefore costs roughly $1.30 at list price before references.

On VideoGenAPI, MiniMax H3 is included in monthly plans and billed per video rather than per second, at 1080p for 5 to 15 seconds. At volume, that difference dominates: see the pricing comparison.

Calling H3 by API

curl -X POST "https://videogenapi.com/api/v1/generate" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VIDEOGEN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "minimax-h3",
    "prompt": "A skateboarder lands a trick in an empty pool at dusk, board clatters, dust kicks up, low tracking shot",
    "duration": 10
  }'

Text-to-video and image-to-video both work; add image_url to animate a still. For how H3 compares with Google and Kuaishou's flagships, read Veo 3.1 vs Kling 3 vs MiniMax H3.

Frequently asked questions

Sources