Mercury 2.5 (Preview)
Last verified September 7, 2026 · Inception Labs pricing ↗$0.040/1M input · $0.150/1M output · 260K context · Inception Labs
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Alternatives to Mercury 2.5 (Preview)
Pricing Details
Inception LabsSold exclusively through OpenRouter; Inception's own API does not serve it and its docs pricing table does not list it. Currently on a flat 80% launch discount: $0.04/$0.15 with cached input reads at $0.004, against a list card of $0.20/$0.75 and $0.02. OpenRouter's banner states the deadline verbatim: 'Limited-time 80% discount via Inception through September 8, 2026 at 07:00 UTC', and its endpoints API carries an explicit discount: 0.8 field (Mercury 2 returns discount: 0). Inception's own X post is indexed as '80% off pricing through 9/7', the same instant in Pacific wall-clock. The discount is uniform across input, output and cache read, so the reversion is exactly 5.00x on every line regardless of prompt mix, cache-hit rate or reasoning level. No batch tier, no cache-write price, no context-length cliff (flat across the full 260K), text-to-text only. Reasoning tokens bill at the output rate as a subset of the completion count, per Inception's FAQ, so effort levels change token count and never price per token; OpenRouter exposes none/low/medium/high (default medium) while Inception's docs describe instant/low/medium/high for Mercury 2 and document nothing for 2.5. The post-promo list is Mercury 2's card with input and cache read 20% lower and output identical to the cent. No benchmark exists from any source: Inception published none and no launch post, Artificial Analysis 404s on every slug, and OpenRouter carries a benchmarks object for Mercury 2 but none for 2.5. The only quality claim is '10+ point jump in intelligence over Mercury 2' with no index named. Speed claim 1,107 tok/s on unspecified 'standard GPUs' against 471 tok/s P50 on OpenRouter's live traffic (Mercury 2 serves 233 the same way, so ~2.02x measured like for like). Estimated tokens (different tokenizer).
Input / 1M tokens
$0.04
Output / 1M tokens
$0.15
Context Window
260K
Max Output
66K
Launch discount
Scheduled price change
Mercury 2.5 (Preview) bills at $0.04 input / $0.15 output per 1M tokens through September 7, 2026. From September 8, 2026 the rate becomes $0.2 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens, a 400% increase. Every figure on this page uses the rate in effect today.
Inception Labs’s published pricing ↗Price History
Launched at current price on 2026-08-31. No price changes recorded since.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Mercury 2.5 (Preview) pricing and usage