---
title: "Inception: Mercury 2 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/models/inception__mercury-2/
description: "Inception: Mercury 2: $0.250/M in, $0.750/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper."
---

# Inception: Mercury 2 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai

> Inception: Mercury 2: $0.250/M in, $0.750/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper.

[Leaderboard](/) / Inception

# Mercury 2

Inception · released 2026-03-04

 $0.375 per million tokens, balanced Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic

## DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is both better and cheaper.

It scores **+29.9** higher and costs **72% less** ($0.105/M against $0.375/M) on this workload — and it does everything this model does.

[Ling-3.0-flash](/models/inclusionai__ling-3.0-flash) is cheaper still (92% less) but drops 50K → 33K max output.

### Every price dimension

| Input | $0.250 /M |
| --- | --- |
| Output | $0.750 /M |
| Cached input | $0.025 /M |

### Independent scores

| Intelligence | 21.9 |
| --- | --- |
| Coding | 31.1 |
| Agentic | 9.5 |
| LMArena Elo | 1357.8 default |

Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.

### Capability

| Context window | 128K |
| --- | --- |
| Max output | 50K |
| Input modes | text |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |

### Provenance

| Price source | openrouter.ai |
| --- | --- |
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |

Mercury 2 is an extremely fast reasoning LLM, and the first reasoning diffusion LLM (dLLM). Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...