Inception

Mercury 2

AI model by Inception. Real-time pricing and benchmark data.

Pricing (per 1M tokens)

Input$0.25
Output$0.75
Blended (3:1)$0.38

Source: Artificial Analysis

Performance

Output Speed835 tok/s
Time to First Token3930ms

Median values from Artificial Analysis

Editorial Analysis

Profile. Mercury 2 is a budget-tier option from Inception at $0.75/M output tokens. Despite the low price, it scores competitively on Coding Index (31.1) and Intelligence Index (21.9) — making it a candidate for high-volume production workloads where unit cost dominates.

Latency. On latency, Mercury 2 reports 835 tok/s output speed and 3930ms time-to-first-token. Output speed is in the top tier — usable for streamed interactive UIs.

Cost model. For a workload of 1M input tokens + 100K output tokens, Mercury 2 costs $0.33 per million input-equivalent requests. Multiply by your monthly request volume to project the bill, and compare against the speed/correctness profile above to decide if the trade-off is worth it for your workload.

Editorial summary generated from public pricing and benchmark data (Artificial Analysis API). All numbers are sourced — see the Artificial Analysis methodology for benchmark definitions. Last refreshed 2026-08-24.

Compare with similar models

ModelInputOutputSpeed
Mercury 2Current
$0.25$0.75835 tok/s
Llama 3.3 Instruct 70B
$0.66$0.7284 tok/s
Hermes 3 - Llama-3.1 70B
$0.70$0.7034 tok/s
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct
$0.18$0.70107 tok/s
Mixtral 8x7B Instruct
$0.45$0.70
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct
$0.20$0.80109 tok/s

Example Costs

Single Request
$0.0006
1.0K in / 500 out
1K Requests/day
$0.6250
1.0M in / 500.0K out
10K Requests/day
$6.25
10.0M in / 5.0M out