Mercury 2 API Pricing
Inception · Budget · Apache 2.0 · released 2026-03. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
Mercury 2 has held the same list price since 2026-08-15 and is the 82nd cheapest of 142 Budget models. Only one host, Inception, sells it, so there is no second price to shop. No Arena score is published for it, so it carries no Efficiency score and cannot hold the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $0.25 per 1M tokens
- Output: $0.75 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: $0.03
- Context window: 128K
Mercury 2 market position
On blended price ($0.600 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 43% of Budget models: 82nd cheapest of 142. Across every category it is cheaper than 71% of priced text models in the catalogue: 82nd cheapest of 281.
Mercury 2 licence, size and capabilities
Mercury 2 is open source: its weights are published under Apache 2.0, an OSI-approved licence with no field-of-use limit, so it can be self-hosted as well as bought by the token. Its parameter count is not published. Listed capabilities: Text, Reasoning, Code, Agents. Filling its 128K context window once costs $0.03 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $55 – $75 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $79 – $110 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $318 – $340 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $186 – $198 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $191 – $225 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $72 – $83 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $98 – $102 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $281 – $375 |
Mercury 2 pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 1 host. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-09-28 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown.
Inception is the only host with a published rate, $0.25 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens, which is the price shown on this page.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| Inception (the price shown above) | $0.25 | $0.75 |
Mercury 2 price history
Mercury 2 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.25 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
Alternatives to Mercury 2
- Next cheaper Budget model: Qwen3 Coder Next (Alibaba) at $0.596 blended, 1% less.
- Next more expensive: WizardLM-2 8x22B (Microsoft) at $0.620 blended, 3% more.
Common questions about Mercury 2 pricing
- How much does Mercury 2 cost?
- Mercury 2 costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does Mercury 2 offer batch or cached pricing?
- Prompt-cache reads cost $0.03/M input tokens. No batch pricing is published.
- What would Mercury 2 cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, Mercury 2 costs about $75 at list prices.
- Has the price of Mercury 2 changed?
- Mercury 2 has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $0.25 input / $0.75 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for Mercury 2 in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
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