Neither wins outright: Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview is the pick when you need audio input, MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Minimax | |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.25 | $0 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $1.50 | $0 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.56 | $0 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 50% | 90% |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens (~1,573 pages) | 1.0M tokens (~1,573 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 81% | 81% |
| Max output per response | 66K tokens (~49,200 words) | 944K tokens (~707,800 words) |
| Input types | text, image, video, file, audio | text, image, video |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | No | Yes |
| Listed since | 2026-03-03 | 2026-05-31 |
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) | Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $48.75 | $0 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) saves $48.75 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $45.00 | $0 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) saves $45.00 |
| 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) | $48.00 | $0 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) saves $48.00 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $29.00 | $0 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) saves $29.00 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $14.00 | $0 | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) saves $14.00 |
| Capability | Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview | MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) | 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 | ✓ Yes | — | 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 | ✓ Yes | repeat a generation for tests and evals |
| Log-probabilities | — | — | 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: Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview is the pick when you need audio input, MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) when cost matters at scale. In short: Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview when you need audio input, you need file / PDF input, you need built-in web search; MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) when cost matters at scale, you generate long outputs in one go, you want to prototype at zero cost.
MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) is cheaper: $0 vs $0.56 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 100% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $0 against $48.75.
Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview costs $0.25 per 1M input tokens and $1.50 per 1M output tokens; MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) costs $0 input and $0 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Both take 1.0M tokens per request — roughly 1,573 pages of text.
Tool calling — Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview: yes, MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free): yes. JSON-schema structured output — Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview: yes, MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free): yes.
Yes, both accept image input.
MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) has a free variant (minimax/minimax-m3:free). Free variants usually carry tighter rate limits.
Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview can write up to 66K tokens (about 49,200 words) per response; MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) up to 944K (about 707,800 words).
Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview was listed on 2026-03-03; MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) on 2026-05-31.
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview is Google's high-efficiency model optimized for high-volume use cases. It outperforms Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite on overall quality and approaches Gemini 2.5 Flash performance across...
Full Google: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview specs →MiniMax-M3 is a multimodal foundation model from MiniMax. It supports text, image, and video inputs with text output, a 1M-token context window, and is suited for long-horizon agentic work, coding,...
Full MiniMax: MiniMax M3 (free) specs →