Mercury API Pricing (November 2026)
Mercury API prices run from $0.20 to $0.75 per million tokens across 2 current models. The cheapest is Mercury 3 at $0.20 input and $0.70 output per million tokens. Every rate below was read on Inception (Mercury)'s own pricing page, on the date shown in its row.
| Model | Input /M | Cache read /M | Output /M | Batch in /M | Batch out /M | Context | Status | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mercury 3 mercury-3 | $0.20 | $0.02−90% | $0.70 | — | — | 1M | Flagship | 2026-10-21 |
Mercury Edit 2 mercury-edit-2 | $0.25 | $0.025−90% | $0.75 | — | — | 32K | Current | 2026-10-21 |
| Mercury Voice | $0.40 | $0.04−90% | $1.50 | — | — | 128K | Restricted · Enterprise customers only - Inception enables it per organisation on request through sales@inceptionlabs.ai | 2026-10-21 |
Mercury 2.5 mercury-2.5 | $0.20 | $0.02−90% | $0.75 | — | — | 260K | Deprecated · retires Nov 15, 2026 · → Mercury 3 | 2026-10-21 |
Mercury 2 mercury-2 | $0.25 | $0.025−90% | $0.75 | — | — | 128K | Deprecated · retires Nov 15, 2026 · → Mercury 3 | 2026-10-21 |
US dollars per million tokens, list rates on Inception (Mercury)'s own API. Cache read is the price of a cached input token. Batch is the asynchronous API, where the vendor offers one. The date in each row is when we last read it on the vendor's pricing page; it links to that page.
Mercury API monthly cost estimates
What light use (10M input + 2M output tokens a month), medium use (100M input + 20M output tokens a month), heavy use (1B input + 200M output tokens a month) costs on each current model, at list price with no caching and no batch discount.
| Model | Input / output per 1M | Light · 10M + 2M | Medium · 100M + 20M | Heavy · 1B + 200M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury 3 | $0.20 / $0.70 | $3.40 | $34.00 | $340 |
| Mercury Edit 2 | $0.25 / $0.75 | $4.00 | $40.00 | $400 |
Prompt caching and the Batch API cut these figures; the next sections show by how much. For your own token counts, use the LLM API cost calculator.
Mercury API price history
Mercury API price changes and releases
Prices are read from Inception's own developer table and models page. Company history is from the launch coverage and the lead investor's announcement, cited as reported rather than vendor-stated.
Retired Mercury models and their replacements
1 Mercury model no longer answers on Inception (Mercury)'s API. The price is the last one Inception (Mercury) listed; the replacement is the current end of the vendor's own succession chain.
| Model | Status | Last price in / out per 1M | Use instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury 2.5 Preview | Withdrawn | $0.20 / $0.75 | Mercury 3 |
platform.inceptionlabs.ai — API keys and playground. The endpoint is OpenAI-compatible, so adopting it is a base-URL and model-name change rather than a rewrite. Every new account is granted 100 million free tokens.
DOCSThe developer table that prices Mercury 3, Mercury Voice, Mercury Decide, Mercury 2.5, Mercury 2 and Mercury Edit 2, with endpoints, context windows and max output per model, and launch discounts shown against list. This is the source for the rates on this page.
RESELLERResells Mercury 3 alongside Inception's own API, Baseten and Vercel; it was the only route to the Mercury 2.5 preview. A reseller sets its own margin, so the rate you pay there need not equal the vendor's published figure.
Google (Gemini Flash)
The mainstream fast tier most teams reach for first, with vision and a far larger ecosystem. Mercury's pitch against it is raw tokens per second, not capability breadth or price.
PRICE PEERAnthropic (Haiku)
The model Inception benchmarks Mercury 3 against, from a frontier lab, with vision, caching and a much wider tool ecosystem, and a lower list card than Mercury 3. If latency is not the binding constraint, this is the safer default.
CHEAPERAlibaba (Qwen Flash)
Materially cheaper per token and multimodal, but China-hosted, which is a procurement question Inception does not raise. Mercury does not win on price against this tier.
CODE PEERKwaipilot (KAT Coder)
Coding-specialised rows in a comparable band, aimed at the same IDE and agent workloads Mercury Edit 2 targets.
OPEN-WEIGHT GIANTAlibaba (Qwen)
The Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) model family from Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Lab. First released in 2023, Qwen is the most-downloaded open-weight model family in the world — most tiers ship under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face and ModelScope, while the proprietary Max tier is served through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio.
GLM ARCHITECTZhipu (Z.ai / GLM)
The Beijing lab behind the GLM models, also operating internationally as Z.ai. Spun out of Tsinghua University in 2019, Zhipu ships strong coding/agentic models, multiple free tiers, and open weights — and was the first of China's "Six Tigers" to pursue an IPO. It also sits on the US Entity List.
Mercury API pricing FAQ
Practical questions about Mercury pricing, the free allowance, and what a diffusion LLM does and does not change about your bill.
Q · 01 Which Mercury model should I start with?
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$0.20/M input and $0.70/M output with a 1M window, and is 50% off at launch. Mercury 2 and Mercury 2.5 are closed to new users and keep existing users only until November 15, 2026. Mercury Voice is for enterprise voice agents and is enabled through sales. Mercury Edit 2 is for autocomplete and next-edit tooling, not chat. Q · 02 Is Mercury actually cheap?
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$0.20 input and $0.70 output sit above GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5, the two models Inception benchmarks it against, and above the cheapest Chinese rows. While the 50% launch discount runs, $0.10/$0.35 ties those two on input and undercuts them on output, but Inception gives no end date, and the 80% discount on Mercury 2.5 ended without one. What the company sells is speed - over 1,000 tokens per second - so the honest comparison is cost per completed task under a latency budget. Q · 03 What is a diffusion LLM?
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Q · 04 How real is the free tier?
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Q · 05 What happens to Mercury 2 and Mercury 2.5?
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Q · 06 Is Mercury open weight?
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Inception came out of stealth in February 2025 and is based in Palo Alto. It was founded by three academics — Stefano Ermon of Stanford, who co-invented diffusion models, Aditya Grover of UCLA and Volodymyr Kuleshov of Cornell. In November 2025 it raised a $50 million seed led by Menlo Ventures, with Mayfield, Innovation Endeavors, Microsoft's M12, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks and Nvidia's NVentures participating. Those company facts come from launch coverage and the investors' own announcements, not from a vendor pricing page.
The technical bet is what makes this provider worth a page. Every other model in this catalogue is autoregressive: it produces one token, then the next, conditioned on what came before. A diffusion LLM starts from noise and refines a whole span in parallel. The practical consequence is throughput — Inception quotes over 1,000 tokens per second for Mercury 2 — which is why the company's own framing is speed rather than price.
And that framing matters when reading the rates. At $0.20–$0.25 per million input tokens Mercury is not a budget outlier: it lands in the same band as the mainstream cheap tiers from the large labs, above the cheapest Chinese rows. Buying Mercury to cut a token bill is the wrong reason. Buying it because a task is latency-bound — voice, autocomplete, an agent loop where a slow frontier model is unusable at any price — is the argument the vendor is actually making, and the one worth testing.
The line moves fast. Mercury 2.5 reached general availability on September 8, 2026 at 80% off, and six weeks later Mercury 3 replaced it: a 1M-token window, a $0.20/$0.70 list card and 50% off at launch, again with no end date. Mercury 2 and 2.5 closed to new users the same day, with access for existing users until November 15, 2026, and Mercury 2.5's discount ended without notice. The site prices every Mercury model at list and shows a discount beside it, because a discount with no end date can stop on any day.