Credit systems are usually opaque on purpose: a number with no units, floating free of any dollar figure, so that nothing can be compared. This one is not. The credit counts on MiniMax H3 Max are a published per-second price divided by a fixed constant, and once you have the constant the whole ladder becomes legible.
The divisor is $0.002 per credit, applied to the upstream per-second rate.
| Engine | fal rate at 768P | ÷ $0.002 | Credits per second |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instant (H3 Max Turbo) | $0.04 | 20 | 20 |
| Standard (MiniMax H3) | $0.06 | 30 | 30 |
| H3 Max, original endpoint | $0.08 | 40 | 40 |
Three engines, three upstream prices, three credit rungs. No averaging, no blended house rate: the ratio between the engines survives the conversion intact, which is the only property of a credit system that actually matters. If one endpoint is twice the price of another upstream, it should be twice the credits downstream, and here it is — 40 against 20, exactly double.
The Turbo post-train at 480P lists at $0.025 a second. Divide by $0.002 and you get 12.5. Credits are whole numbers, so that rung is priced at 13 credits a second — a rounding of about 4% against you, and the only place in the ladder where the division is not exact.
That is a small number and an honest one to point at. It is also a useful tell: a house that rounds up at the only fractional rung and leaves every other rung exact is doing arithmetic, not building a margin into the units.
This is where people go wrong, so it is worth separating cleanly:
Both facts are published, and mixing them produces nonsense. Worked through on the plan side, a 5-second clip at 768P is 100 credits — 5 × 20 — and on the Pro plan that lands around 66¢ a generation. Allow for the retakes everyone actually does, and the honest planning figure is roughly $1.96 for a finished clip rather than 66¢ for one attempt.
Two conversions cover essentially every question:
credits for a run = credits_per_second × seconds × takes
seconds of output = credit_balance ÷ credits_per_second ÷ takes
A 1,200-credit monthly allowance at the Instant rung is 60 seconds of 768P output at one take, or twelve 5-second clips first-try, or four finished clips if you allow three takes each. That last number is the one to budget with, and it is arithmetic rather than a marketing claim.
Most write-ups of this model list two post-trains, because the specification table lists the two the interface calls by default. There are three prices at 768P upstream, and the third sits behind a dropdown at twice the Instant rate. If you have been comparing this model against another on a single per-second figure, check which of the three you were quoting — it changes the comparison by a factor of two.
The per-second rates, the takes multiplier and the zero per-generation fee are published as dated limits on the MiniMax H3 Max specifications page. The endpoint-by-endpoint view, with every fal endpoint and rate in one table, is where the three upstream prices sit next to the endpoints they belong to.