MiniMax M3 Slashes API Caching Bills
Least-Cockroach8800 · reddit · 2026-07-08
The author notes that switching a small customer service tool from GPT-5.5 to MiniMax M3 significantly dropped their API bill. The application is a support tool with a few hundred daily active users; it relies on long static system prompts and product documentation, resulting in a high cache hit rate.
The post compares the caching pricing of the two platforms: OpenAI charges about $0.50 per million tokens for cached input, while M3 charges about $0.12 per million tokens for cached reads. Based on a two-week billing comparison, the author concludes that M3 is much cheaper for actual input costs in high-cache scenarios.
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