AIBRIEF
Metaso, a Chinese AI search platform, now hosts Chinese AI developer MiniMax's newly open sourced H3 video generation model in a browser, dropping a five second clip below half a yuan (about $0.07).
A Chinese AI search platform, Metaso, is now selling access to MiniMax's newly open-sourced H3 video model for as little as 0.09 yuan (roughly $0.012) per second of 768P output, with a 2K tier at 0.15 yuan (about $0.021) per second, putting a typical five-second clip below half a yuan (around $0.07 at recent USD/CNY rates).
H3 is billed as MiniMax's first open-source video release, described at launch as topping the Artificial Analysis video-editing leaderboard. The model can produce native two-channel audio, 2K resolution, motion transfer, and text rendering in a single pass. Running it on your own machine is the part the headlines skip: a clip that prints in seconds on Metaso's webpage can take 20 to 40 minutes on a consumer GPU after installing CUDA, dependencies, and a workflow harness.
Users open a browser tab, type or upload, and get a clip back; ComfyUI integration is available for heavier workflows. The pricing is the platform's retail number, not the model's intrinsic cost, a useful distinction, since "open" is real but "free" is not for anyone who keeps the model on their own hardware.
What changed this week is the floor: hosted AI video has crossed into few-cents-per-second territory by absorbing the GPU and setup barrier into a webpage, and that changes what a casual creator can actually do without a render farm.