MiniMax: MiniMax M2.1 API Price, Cost Calculator & Specs

At $0.30/$1.20 per 1M tokens, MiniMax M2.1 is aggressively priced for a coding model—cheaper than Codestral 2508 ($0.30/$0.90) with better multilingual benchmarks. The 10B parameter size means fast inference, making it viable for high-volume coding tasks. However, the 204K context is limiting for large codebases, and the recommendation to preserve reasoning between turns adds implementation complexity.

Best For:

IDE and Coding Tool Integration: Designed as an agent "brain" for development tools. If you're building a VS Code extension or GitHub Copilot alternative, M2.1's latency and cost profile make it worth evaluating.

Multilingual Code Generation: 72.5% on SWE-Bench Multilingual is competitive. Good for projects that span multiple programming languages or need to understand non-English code comments.

High-Volume Autocomplete/Suggestions: The lightweight architecture and caching support ($0.03/1M cache read) make this practical for real-time code suggestions where you need to make many rapid API calls.

Low-Cost Agentic Workflows: At $180/month for 1K users doing 20 interactions each, this fits budget-conscious AI assistants that need to route tasks to a capable but affordable coder.