Coding Plan vs Agent Plan vs Token Plan: 2026 China AI Subscription Showdown

In the first half of 2026, China’s AI coding subscription market split into clearly different product shapes. What used to be a fairly uniform “Coding Plan” category got pulled in three different directions:

• Volcano Ark Agent Plan (launched 2026-05-11): coding + multimodal + Harness tooling, AFP credits
• MiniMax Token Plan (upgraded from Coding Plan on 2026-03-23): all-modal (text/image/video/voice/music)
• Bailian Token Plan Team Edition: multi-seat + multi-model + text/image

All three are “more than just a Coding Plan”, but they’re optimizing for different things. This piece compares them head-to-head so you can decide which one fits.

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TL;DR

Product	Positioning	Entry price
Ark Agent Plan	Doubao full-stack + Harness toolchain Agent bundle	¥40/mo
MiniMax Token Plan	World’s first all-modal subscription, includes video & music	¥29/mo
Bailian Token Plan (Team)	Team / enterprise multi-seat, broadest model lineup	¥198/mo

Need Doubao + image/video + Agent toolchain → Ark Agent Plan. Need audio/video/music multimodal → MiniMax Token Plan. Team collaboration + data compliance → Bailian Token Plan (Team).

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Pricing & Tiers

Vendor	Entry	Mid	High	Top
Ark Agent Plan	Small ¥40	Medium ¥200	Large ¥500	Max ¥1000
MiniMax Token Plan	Starter ¥29	Plus ¥49	Max ¥119	Ultra (High-Speed) ¥899
Bailian Token Plan (Team)	Standard ¥198	Premium ¥698	Enterprise ¥1398	¥5,000 shared pack

Takeaways:

• Lowest budget: MiniMax at ¥29 (also the smallest quota)
• Lowest entry with full bundle: Ark at ¥40 — slightly more than MiniMax but bundles richer models/tools
• Most expensive, broadest models: Bailian Team edition starts at ¥198, targeted at teams/enterprises

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Billing Units

This is the easiest place to get confused and the most important difference:

Product	Unit	Refresh mechanism	When exhausted
Ark Agent Plan	AFP (Agent Fuel Points)	Daily 00:00 release + 5h rolling window	Wait for next window or upgrade
MiniMax Token Plan	request (M2.7 calls)	5h rolling window + per-day multimodal quotas	Wait for next window
Bailian Token Plan (Team)	Credits (weighted by model)	Monthly total + shared pack for overage	Upgrade or buy shared pack

Interpretation:

• Ark’s AFP rolls token volume, model tier and long-context multipliers into one fuel unit — long prompts burn fast (7.5× multiplier above 128k context)
• MiniMax’s request is roughly 1 M2.7 call, simple and intuitive, but multimodal quotas are tracked per day separately
• Bailian’s Credits scale with token usage and are uniform across models — easiest for enterprise budgeting

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Model Lineups

Ark Agent Plan (6 models)

Type	Model
Coding	Doubao-Seed
Video gen	Doubao-Seedance
Image gen	Doubao-Seedream
Multimodal embedding	Doubao-embedding-vision
Third-party	GLM-5.1, Kimi-K2.6

MiniMax Token Plan (6 models)

Type	Model
Coding	MiniMax-M2.7 / M2.7 High-Speed
Video	Hailuo Video
Voice	Speech 2.8
Image	Image-01
Music	Music-2.6 (100 free/day)

Bailian Token Plan Team (14 models)

Type	Model
Coding / general	qwen3.6-plus, qwen3.6-flash
Reasoning	deepseek-v4-pro, deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v3.2
Third-party	kimi-k2.6, kimi-k2.5, glm-5.1, glm-5, MiniMax-M2.5
Image	qwen-image-2.0, qwen-image-2.0-pro, wan2.7-image, wan2.7-image-pro

Verdict: Bailian has the widest catalogue, Ark bets on its own Doubao stack, and MiniMax is the only one with both music and video.

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Modality Coverage

	Ark Agent Plan	MiniMax Token Plan	Bailian Team
Text / code	✅	✅	✅
Image generation	✅	✅	✅
Image understanding	✅ (embedding-vision)	—	✅ (qwen-image)
Video generation	✅ (Seedance)	✅ (Hailuo)	—
Voice	—	✅ (Speech 2.8)	—
Music	—	✅ (Music-2.6)	—
Vector / Embedding	✅	—	✅

MiniMax is the only one with music + voice. Bailian is the only one without video. Ark covers image/video/embedding but no audio yet.

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Harness / Agent Tooling

Capability	Ark Agent Plan	MiniMax	Bailian Team
Web search	✅ (shared with Doubao)	—	—
Built-in memory	✅ (embedding)	—	—
Auto routing	✅	—	—
Multi-seat	—	—	✅
Shared usage pack	—	—	✅
No-train-on-data commitment	—	—	✅
24/7 AI companion	✅ (Medium+)	—	—

Ark Agent Plan’s real moat is its Harness toolchain — it bundles search, memory and Auto routing that you’d otherwise have to glue together yourself. Bailian Team’s moat is organizational — seats, shared packs, compliance. MiniMax doesn’t differentiate on Agent orchestration; its strength is modality breadth.

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Client Compatibility

Client	Ark Agent Plan	MiniMax	Bailian Team
Claude Code	✅	✅	✅
OpenCode	✅	✅	✅
Trae	✅	✅	✅ (via Qwen Code etc.)
OpenClaw	✅	—	✅
Hermes Agent	✅	—	✅
Cline	—	✅	✅
Codex CLI	—	✅	✅
Cursor	—	✅	✅

Ark Agent Plan leans toward Agent frameworks (OpenClaw, Hermes), while MiniMax / Bailian cover open-source IDE plugins (Cline, Cursor) more widely.

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Decision Tree

What's your primary use case?
├─ Pure text / code coding
│   ├─ Solo dev on a budget → Ark Coding Plan (Lite ¥40/mo, ¥9.9 first month, not in this matchup)
│   └─ Team needing compliance → Bailian Token Plan Team (¥198+)
│
├─ Coding + image/video generation (multimodal Agent)
│   ├─ Want Doubao + Agent toolchain → Ark Agent Plan
│   └─ Want Hailuo video / MiniMax music → MiniMax Token Plan
│
├─ Coding + voice / music
│   └─ MiniMax Token Plan (the only choice)
│
└─ Multi-user team + mixed models
    └─ Bailian Token Plan (Team)

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Unit Price Estimate

Rough ¥/¥1000-unit comparison at the entry tier (indicative — real cost depends on model & context):

Product	Entry price	Nominal quota	¥ / 1,000 units
Ark Agent Plan Small	¥40	20,000 AFP	~¥2 / 1,000 AFP
MiniMax Token Plan Starter	¥29	600 req/5h (≈ 18,000/mo)	~¥1.6 / 1,000 req
Bailian Token Plan Standard	¥198	25,000 Credits	~¥8 / 1,000 Credits

Warning: AFP / request / Credit are not directly comparable. Ark AFP is blown up by the 7.5× long-context multiplier; Bailian Credits scale with token weighting; MiniMax request is flat per call. Real cost must be benchmarked against your own prompt patterns for a week before you decide.

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Honest Weaknesses

• Ark Agent Plan: token unit price is 2~2.5× higher than the old Coding Plan; the 7.5× long-context multiplier is unfriendly to repo-dump-style prompting
• MiniMax Token Plan: models are all MiniMax-first-party — no Qwen / DeepSeek / GLM swap-in; video / music has per-day caps
• Bailian Token Plan (Team): ¥198 entry is steep for solo devs; no video/voice models, not suitable for multimedia workloads

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Closing Thoughts

China’s AI subscription market is fragmenting from “selling tokens” into three distinct directions: selling Agent fuel / selling modalities / selling seats:

• Volcano Ark is betting on Agent toolchain + Doubao full stack
• MiniMax is betting on full-modal coverage
• Bailian is betting on enterprise multi-seat + multi-model aggregation

In the short term these three won’t fully substitute for each other. Heavy users will likely subscribe to two of them (a common combo: Ark Coding Plan for everyday text coding + MiniMax Token Plan for multimedia work). Run your real workflow against the entry tier for two weeks before committing to a main subscription.

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Related Reading

• Volcano Ark Agent Plan Explained
• Bailian Coding Plan vs Ark Coding Plan
• AI Coding Rate Limits Compared