Inception: Mercury 2.5 API Pricing
Inception: Mercury 2.5 costs $0.040 per 1M input tokens and $0.150 per 1M output tokens (cache reads: $0.0040). Context window: 260K. Prices verified 2026-10-21 · source
Alternatives to consider
53% cheaper with nearly identical quality (20.1 vs 12.3)
+29.5 quality points for 22% more
Rebuilt daily from our snapshot archive — the chart appears once a model has 5+ snapshots of history.
From our own daily snapshot archive — independent of provider announcements.
Intelligence measures reasoning/knowledge/coding benchmarks. A high score with a low blended price = value pick; check the value chart to see where this model lands.
Token economics
| Token type | Price | vs base input |
|---|---|---|
| Standard input | $0.040 | — |
| Cache read | $0.0040 | −90% |
| Output | $0.150 | — |
Prompt caching stores repeated context server-side: reads cost far less, but writes carry a one-time premium.
Higher effort = deeper thinking = more reasoning tokens billed as output.
What would Inception: Mercury 2.5 cost you per month?
| Workload | Requests/mo | Avg tokens (in/out) | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light chatbot | 10,000 | 800 / 400 | $0.92 |
| Coding agent | 5,000 | 8,000 / 2,000 | $3.10 |
| RAG pipeline | 30,000 | 4,000 / 500 | $7.05 |
| Doc summarizer | 2,000 | 20,000 / 1,000 | $1.90 |
Estimates use list prices without prompt caching. Caching can cut input cost by up to 90% on repeated context.
About Inception: Mercury 2.5
Mercury 2.5 is the fastest reasoning LLM, and the latest diffusion LLM (dLLM) from Inception. Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2.5 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...
Compare Inception: Mercury 2.5 with
- Mercury 2.5 vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra Pro
- Mercury 2.5 vs Anthropic: Claude Fable 5
- Mercury 2.5 vs Anthropic: Claude Opus 5
- Mercury 2.5 vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Sol
Popular head-to-heads — see all on the comparisons index.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Inception: Mercury 2.5 cost?
Inception: Mercury 2.5 costs $0.040 per 1M input tokens and $0.150 per 1M output tokens; cached input tokens cost $0.0040 per 1M. Verified 2026-10-21 — provider source.
What is the context window?
260K tokens, with up to 66K output tokens per response. That's roughly 325 pages of text in a single request.
Does it support prompt caching?
Yes — cached input is $0.0040/1M, about 90% cheaper than standard input. Agents and RAG workloads with repeated context benefit most.
What's a cheaper alternative?
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash saves about 54% on a typical workload with comparable quality.
Official resources
- Inception: Mercury 2.5 on OpenRouter — live endpoint, pricing source of record.
- Artificial Analysis leaderboard → — independent intelligence and performance rankings.
- Shred your current bill — paste a CSV and see if switching saves money.