Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 is the pick when cost matters at scale, MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash when you need seed (reproducible sampling).
| Spec | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Minimax |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.10 | $0.15 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $0.50 | $0.60 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.20 | $0.26 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 70% | 65% |
| Context window | 1M tokens (~1,500 pages) | 1.0M tokens (~1,573 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 69% | 80% |
| Max output per response | 128K tokens (~96,000 words) | 524K tokens (~393,200 words) |
| Input types | text, image, file | text, image, video |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | Yes |
| Listed since | 2026-10-07 | 2026-10-19 |
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
| Workload (per month) | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $17.50 | $23.25 | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 saves $5.75 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $17.00 | $24.00 | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 saves $7.00 |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens) | $18.00 | $25.20 | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 saves $7.20 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $11.00 | $15.60 | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 saves $4.60 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $5.50 | $8.10 | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 saves $2.60 |
| Capability | Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash | What it lets you do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tool / function calling | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | call your APIs and run agent loops |
| Structured output (JSON schema) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | return JSON that validates against your schema |
| Reasoning / thinking mode | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems |
| Image input | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | read screenshots, charts and scanned pages |
| Audio input | — | — | take speech or audio directly |
| File / PDF input | ✓ Yes | — | accept documents without your own parsing step |
| Image output | — | — | generate images, not just text |
| Built-in web search | ✓ Yes | — | answer from live web results |
| Seed (reproducible sampling) | — | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | ✓ Yes | read token confidence for classification and scoring |
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 is the pick when cost matters at scale, MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash when you need seed (reproducible sampling). In short: Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 when cost matters at scale, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash when you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities, you generate long outputs in one go, you want to prototype at zero cost.
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 is cheaper: $0.20 vs $0.26 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 24% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $17.50 against $23.25.
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per 1M input tokens and $0.50 per 1M output tokens; MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash costs $0.15 input and $0.60 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash: 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5.
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5: yes, MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5: yes, MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash: yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash has a free variant (minimax/minimax-m3.1-flash:free). Free variants usually carry tighter rate limits.
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash up to 524K (about 393,200 words).
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 was listed on 2026-10-07; MiniMax: MiniMax M3.1 Flash on 2026-10-19.
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