ModelPriceWatch.com
Last scan 2026-10-20 Models tracked 301 Providers 40 Cheapest paid pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 $0.010/Mtok in Every price links to its source

Mercury 2

by Inception

Current budget cheap tier
Email me when Mercury 2 gets cheaper

Today's price · per 1M tokens

Input

$0.250

per 1M tokens

Output

$0.750

per 1M tokens

Blended

$0.375

blended $/1M — 3:1 weighted input:output

Cached input

$0.025

10% of input — prompt caching

How this price is scoped: Inception publishes this rate per TOKEN, not per 1M: its own API root (api.inceptionlabs.ai/v1/models) serves prompt 0.00000025 and completion 0.00000075, which is $0.25 / $0.75 per 1M tokens, with cache reads at 0.000000025 ($0.025 per 1M) and cache writes free. Read unauthenticated on 2026-09-01 and again on 2026-09-02, with no change between the two readings. The vendor's own record links the model to its OpenRouter listing (inception/mercury-2), so that cross-reference is Inception's, not ours. Inception's HTML pricing page does not answer automated reads, so the API record is the source cited here.

Source: official Inception pricing · read MODELPRICEWATCH.COM · 2026-10-20

Price receipt

We read Inception's own model API on and found mercury-2 listed with a price in its own record — that read is where the number above comes from. Inception states this rate per token; the per-1M figures above are that rate multiplied by 1,000,000 — no conversion or estimate is involved. We keep the page text we read; its content hash is 6bc4b9c81e.

Overview

The first diffusion large language model (dLLM) sold as a commercial API. Mercury 2 generates tokens by iterative denoising rather than left-to-right decoding, which Inception reports as 5-10x faster than speed-optimised autoregressive models at comparable quality. 128K context, 50K max output, tools and structured outputs. $0.25 / $0.75 per 1M tokens.

Capabilities

struck through = not supported
Input 1/4
Text ✓ Image Audio Video
Output
Text ✓
Features 3/9
Prompt caching ✓ Reasoning Coding Fast inference ✓ Long context ✓ Open weights Multimodal Web search Realtime

Benchmark performance

accuracy % · higher is better
Percentile vs all tracked models 12.9th3 independent measurements
Percentile per $/Mtok 33.9

We hold no per-benchmark accuracy scores for this model yet, so it has no accuracy average. That is a gap in our coverage, not a sign the model is untested — independent evaluators often publish a composite index for a new model long before releasing its per-benchmark numbers. The percentile above is its standing across the independent composites below.

Independent composite scores
  • AA Intelligence Index: 10.8 (Artificial Analysis composite across reasoning, knowledge and coding evals)
  • AA-Omniscience Index: -50.7 (−100–100)
  • GDPval-AA v2: 494.4 ELO (Real-world work tasks, human baseline = 1000)
How it stacks up
  • Ranks #169 of 196 comparably-measured models by percentile score, across 3 independent measurements
  • Ranks #86 of 196 comparably-tested models by normalized performance per dollar

Source: Artificial Analysis · updated · See full rankings →

Specifications

Provider
Inception
Context window
128K tokens
Modality
text
Parameters
Proprietary
Open source
No — proprietary
Released
Status
Current
Last updated
Tags
budgetfast

Availability verified: — listed on Inception's own page

Official pricing page