Mercury 3 API Pricing

These are the tracked rates, not a live quote. Hosted-provider choice, region, long-context tiers, caching, batch discounts, and temporary promotions can change the actual bill. Open-weight availability does not mean hosted inference is free. Workload examples assume the listed standard input and output rates, with no cache hits or discounts.

Publisher-reported pricing notes

• Launch promotional pricing is temporary; listed prices use the publisher standard rates.

Official release and model references

These references document the model and its release; not every reference is a pricing table. Confirm the applicable endpoint and billing tier with your inference provider before purchase.

• www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-3

Computed straight from the list prices above — token counts are illustrative workload sizes, not measurements of Mercury 3.

In AI IQ's scoring, Mercury 3's list price is adjusted by a token-usage multiplier of 0.444, giving an effective cost of $0.3998 per 1M input + output tokens. That places it #20 of 155 models on the effective-cost ranking (lower is cheaper). Some models spend far more tokens than others on the same task, so effective cost compares what a unit of work really costs. Method details are on the methodology page; see all models on the cost charts and the falling cost of intelligence over time.

Models with a lower effective cost that score within a few IQ points of Mercury 3 (IQ 98), or better.