MiniMax H3 Lite vs H3, Highspeed and Max: Which Tier to Use
What each MiniMax H3 tier costs per second, which sizes and inputs it takes, and how fast H3 Lite came back in our own runs. Pick the right one before you render.
Hailuo3AI
Use H3 Lite for drafts and for most short social clips: it is the cheapest H3 tier and the only one with a 480p option. Move to full H3 when you need 2K or the adaptive aspect ratio. H3 Highspeed sits in between on price but only renders at 768p, from text. H3 Max appears in MiniMax's own API documentation, but WaveSpeed, the platform this site uses, does not offer it yet.
Much of what is written about "Hailuo 3" talks about one model. There are four tiers, and they differ in price, size and what you can feed them. Below is what each one costs on WaveSpeed today (November 10, 2026), and what we measured when we ran H3 Lite on Hailuo3AI. Our timings are single runs, not a benchmark.
The four tiers at a glance
| H3 Lite | H3 | H3 Highspeed | H3 Max | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WaveSpeed price per second | $0.025 at 480p, $0.04 at 768p | $0.10 at 768p, $0.14 at 2K | $0.06 at 768p | Not on WaveSpeed |
| A 5-second clip | $0.125 / $0.20 | $0.50 / $0.70 | $0.30 | Not published there |
| Resolutions | 480p, 768p | 768p, 2K | 768p | 480p, 768p (per MiniMax's docs) |
| Lengths | 4 to 15 s | 5 to 15 s | 4 to 15 s | 5 to 15 s (per MiniMax's docs) |
| Text to video | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| First and last frame | Yes | Yes | Text only on WaveSpeed | See MiniMax's docs |
| References (images, clips, audio) | Yes | Yes | No | See MiniMax's docs |
| Adaptive aspect ratio | No | Yes | No |
Prices come from the WaveSpeed pages for H3 Lite, H3 and H3 Highspeed. Other resellers price the same tiers differently, so check the platform you actually pay.
On Hailuo3AI, those prices become 5 credits a second at 480p and 8 at 768p for H3 Lite. A default 5-second 768p clip is 40 credits.
H3 Lite: what it is
MiniMax's own description on Replicate is short: H3 Lite "does the same things as H3 at a lower price and a lower maximum resolution." It keeps the same three jobs as full H3:
- Text to video, in 21:9, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4 or 9:16.
- Image to video, from a first frame, a last frame or both.
- Reference to video, with up to 9 images, 3 video clips and 3 audio files.
What it drops is the 2K tier and the "adaptive" aspect ratio. If your deliverable is a 2K master, H3 Lite is the wrong tool. If you are exploring ideas, you can render roughly five 768p Lite clips for the price of one H3 clip at 2K.
How fast H3 Lite came back for us
We ran four jobs at 768p on WaveSpeed on November 10, 2026, timing from submission to a downloadable file:
| Job | Length | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Text to video, 21:9 lighthouse in a storm | 5 s | 23 s |
| One image to video, a fox in snow | 4 s | 23 s |
| One image plus a drum loop as reference audio, 9:16 | 4 s | 28 s |
| A 5-second clip as camera-move reference, 21:9 | 4 s | 79 s |
Every clip came back with a sound track: surf and wind, paws on snow, the burner of a hot air balloon. WaveSpeed's pages list 20 to 31 seconds as the typical wait, which matches what we saw for jobs without a reference clip. Adding a reference video roughly tripled the wait.
For comparison, Seedance 2.0 Fast, the other model in our menu, took between 200 and 350 seconds for clips of similar length in our tests a day earlier.
You can rerun the same job:
The fox lifts its head, sniffs the cold air, then turns and trots across the snow into the birch trees, snowflakes drifting down; slow tracking shot from the side, soft crunch of paws on snow and a quiet winter wind. No text, no logos.
이 프롬프트 사용해 보기Attach your own opening image before you generate; without one the prompt runs as text to video.
480p or 768p on H3 Lite?
480p costs 62.5% of the 768p price. In practice that makes it a draft tier: good enough to judge timing, motion and framing, soft when you look at textures or small text.
The frame above comes from one of Cloudflare's published H3 Lite examples (CC BY 4.0), rendered at 480p from a first and a last frame. The motion between the two frames reads clearly; the paper texture does not. Our workflow: draft at 480p until the move is right, then render the keeper once at 768p.
What the reference rules cost
Reference-to-video on H3 Lite has a few billing rules that are easy to miss:
- Reference images: the first five are free, each extra one costs $0.02 (4 credits here).
- Reference clips: billed per second at the output rate, at least 2 seconds per clip, at most 15 seconds in total, rounded up to the next whole second. A 5-second reference at 768p adds $0.20.
- Reference audio: free, but it cannot be the only reference. Add at least one image or clip.
- First and last frame: free on image to video.
Try the camera-move reference yourself by attaching any short clip:
Follow the slow crane-up and push-in camera movement and timing of @Video 1, but the scene is a hot air balloon rising out of a red desert canyon at sunrise, its burner flaring, long shadows on the canyon walls. Wind and the roar of the burner. No text, no logos, no people visible.
이 프롬프트 사용해 보기When to pick which tier
- H3 Lite at 480p: storyboards, animatics, testing ten prompt variants.
- H3 Lite at 768p: finished social clips, B-roll, anything shown on a phone.
- H3 at 2K: a master for a large screen, or when you want the model to choose the aspect ratio.
- H3 Highspeed: text-only clips at 768p when your platform offers it and Lite's quality is not enough. We have not measured its speed.
- H3 Max: check MiniMax's documentation for what it adds; we could not test it.
Limits worth knowing
- H3 Lite cannot edit a clip you upload. A clip only guides motion and camera. On Hailuo3AI, editing existing footage goes through Seedance 2.0 Fast.
- Sound is always on. You cannot switch it off, and the mix changes from take to take.
- Image to video keeps the proportions of your image; the aspect-ratio setting applies to text and reference jobs.
FAQ
Is MiniMax H3 Lite free? Not on Hailuo3AI. New accounts get 10 credits for the image tools, and the shortest H3 Lite clip, 4 seconds at 480p, costs 20.
Is H3 Lite the same as Hailuo 3? It is one tier of MiniMax H3, the model the Hailuo app calls Hailuo 3.0. The full H3 adds 2K output.
Does MiniMax H3 Lite have an API? Yes. It is listed on WaveSpeed, Replicate and other platforms, and MiniMax documents its own API. Prices differ between them.
How long can an H3 Lite clip be? Any whole number of seconds from 4 to 15.
What does "Lite" remove compared with H3? 2K output and the adaptive aspect ratio, per MiniMax. Inputs and jobs are the same.