Is Mercury 2 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Mercury 2 on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, Mercury 2 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 114.3 higher and costs 37% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Mercury 2: 114.3 points higher on LMArena and 37% less per million tokens, $0.14 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1357.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.375/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
Mercury 2 takes text, returns up to 50,000 tokens from a 128,000-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 12 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Mercury 2 scores 1357.6 at $0.38 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 +114.3 | $0.237/M | 37% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +83.0 | $0.144/M | 62% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +76.9 | $0.143/M | 62% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +74.2 | $0.103/M | 73% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +69.8 | $0.175/M | 53% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 +67.2 | $0.302/M | 20% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.6 +65.0 | $0.305/M | 19% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 +46.1 | $0.150/M | 60% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +40.1 | $0.114/M | 70% |
| GLM 4.5 Air | 1383.7 +26.1 | $0.310/M | 17% |
| Solar Pro 4 | 1377.3 +19.7 | $0.158/M | 58% |
| gpt-oss-120b | 1365.9 +8.3 | $0.262/M | 30% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 | $0.153/M | max output |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 | $0.153/M | reasoning |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | 1417.6 | $0.343/M | max output, reasoning |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 | $0.084/M | max output, reasoning |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.7 | $0.172/M | reasoning |
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Saved decision references
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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