MiniMax M3, an open-weight frontier agent, is free on Vercel to Sep 6
A 428B open MoE that beats Claude Opus on agentic browsing, free to run through Sunday — plus the ID that breaks after, self-host specs, and M2.7 too.
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Free through Sunday, Sept 6
M3 and M2.7 run at $0 on Vercel's AI Gateway via GMI Cloud through Sept 6. M3 normally costs about $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 out, so this is roughly a two-week window to run real agent loops for nothing.
Why M3 is worth the swap
It's a 428B open MoE with a 1M-token context (512K guaranteed), native multimodality, and MiniMax's MSA sparse attention. It posts 59% on SWE-Bench Pro, 70% on OSWorld-Verified, and 83.5 on BrowseComp — ahead of Claude Opus's 79.3 on agentic web browsing.
The free-ID gotcha
Ship with minimax/minimax-m3-free and the ID hard-errors the moment the promo ends. Use the base minimax/minimax-m3 ID with GMI Cloud set as preferred provider instead — free routing now, automatic fallback to paid providers after Sept 6, no code change.
Weekend build: a metered-free repo agent
Point Cursor, Codex, or your own harness at a whole repo and let M3 grind — 1M context at $0 means you're not counting tokens for two weeks. Native multimodality lets you hand it screenshots or a full issue thread to reproduce bugs and drive a browser.
Then self-host it
M3 is open-weight, with weights headed to Hugging Face and GitHub, so the free window is a test drive before you buy GPUs. It's a 428B MoE, though — self-hosting it needs serious VRAM, not a laptop.