Mercury 2 pricing and routing profile
Mercury 2 from Inception lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens, with a 128,000-token context window. Prices from OpenRouter's catalogue on 2026-09-28.
Tool callingStructured outputReasoning control
Cost per 1,000 requests
| Request shape | List cost |
|---|---|
| Classification or routing (600 tokens in, 10 out) | $0.158 |
| Chat reply (2,000 in, 400 out) | $0.80 |
| Retrieval-augmented answer (8,000 in, 500 out) | $2.38 |
Before prompt caching. Try your own shape in the cost calculator.
Can Gimbix route to it first?
Not as a first-answer model through OpenRouter: no host returns token log probabilities for Mercury 2. It can still be the model Gimbix falls back to when a cheaper model is unsure.
Cheaper models that can answer first
Models priced below Mercury 2 that expose a confidence signal. Whether they answer your traffic as well is what a Gimbix pilot measures.
| Model | Input / output per 1M | Cheaper on a chat reply |
|---|---|---|
| Llama 4 Maverick | $0.188 / $0.652 | 21% |
| Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct | $0.15 / $0.60 | 32% |
| gpt-oss-120b | $0.15 / $0.60 | 32% |
| GPT-4o-mini | $0.15 / $0.60 | 32% |
| GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) | $0.15 / $0.60 | 32% |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | $0.15 / $0.50 | 38% |
Questions
How much does Mercury 2 cost?
Mercury 2 lists at $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens on OpenRouter as of 2026-09-28. A typical chat reply of 2,000 input and 400 output tokens costs about $0.80 per 1,000 requests.
What is the context window of Mercury 2?
128,000 tokens.
Can a cheaper model replace Mercury 2?
Sometimes. Gimbix proves it on your own traffic before routing: the cheaper model must match Mercury 2 on one half of your requests and make at most three answers worse on the other.