Mercury 2: pricing, context and benchmarks

What you need to know about Mercury 2

Mercury 2 was released by Inception Labs (United States) on March 4, 2026. It accepts text as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 128,000 tokens, larger than 19 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 50,000 tokens in one go.

It has been available for about 8 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

Mercury 2 pricing

On OpenRouter, Mercury 2 costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.375 per million, more expensive than 32 % of paid models (2 times cheaper than the median of $0.76).

A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.0009. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $26 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.025 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Mercury 2. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Features, privacy and local use

• It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
• It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
• It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.

Its weights are not published: it can only be used through the Inception Labs API or a broker such as OpenRouter, which means sending your data off your machines.

Other Inception Labs models