Inception · Released Feb 24, 2026Mercury 2
Reasoning model for deliberate analysis, multi-step problem solving, and tool use.
- Capability
- —No ECI score yet
- Input
- $0.25per 1M tokens
- Output
- $0.75per 1M tokens
- Context
- 128K50K max output
What it costs
- Input
- $0.25per million tokens
- Output
- $0.75per million tokens
- Cached input
- $0.025per million tokens
- Blended (3:1)
- $0.375cheaper than 68% of priced models
Typical monthly bills
| Monthly usage | Estimated cost |
|---|---|
| Side project2M input + 0.5M output tokens | $0.875 |
| Team assistant25M input + 5M output tokens | $10.00 |
| Production app250M input + 50M output tokens | $100.00 |
Official Inception API price, as listed on models.dev.
Independent benchmarks
Epoch AI has not published a Capabilities Index score for Mercury 2 yet.
The details
- Lab
- Inception
- Released
- Feb 24, 2026
- Knowledge cutoff
- Jan 1, 2025
- Context window
- 128,000 tokens
- Max output
- 50,000 tokens
- Inputs
- Text
- Output
- Text
- Reasoning
- Adjustable effort low · medium · high
- Tool calling
- Yes
- Structured output
- Yes
- Weights
- Proprietary
- API model ID
mercury-2on Inception- Availability
- 1 API providerlisted on models.dev
More from Inception
About Mercury 2
How much does Mercury 2 cost?
Mercury 2 costs $0.25 input / $0.75 output per million tokens (official Inception API price). Cached input is $0.025 per million tokens. At a 3:1 input-to-output mix that is $0.375 per million tokens, cheaper than 68% of the 360 priced models we track.
What is the context window of Mercury 2?
Mercury 2 accepts up to 128,000 tokens per request and can write up to 50,000 tokens in one response.
How good is Mercury 2?
Epoch AI has not published a Capabilities Index score for Mercury 2 yet.
Is Mercury 2 open source?
No. Mercury 2 is proprietary; you use it through Inception’s API or partner platforms.
What inputs does Mercury 2 support?
Mercury 2 accepts text and replies in text. It is a reasoning model with low, medium and high effort settings, supports tool calling and can return structured JSON output.
When was Mercury 2 released?
Inception released Mercury 2 on Feb 24, 2026. Its training data runs to Jan 1, 2025.
What are the best alternatives to Mercury 2?
The closest current models from other labs on capability, price and release date are Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (NVIDIA, $0.20 / $0.80), Trinity Large Thinking (Arcee AI, $0.25 / $0.80), Seed 1.8 (ByteDance Seed, $0.119 / $1.19) and Qwen3 Coder Next (Alibaba (Qwen), $0.20 / $1.20).