Reasoning model for deliberate analysis, multi-step problem solving, and tool use
Mercury 2 by inception is offered by 6 providers on this page. Its official list price is $0.25 per 1M input tokens and $0.75 per 1M output tokens. The lowest paid channel is NanoGPT at $0.25 / $0.75 per 1M, about 1.3× below the list price. That channel is a third-party gateway, so confirm its availability and rate limits before depending on it.
Artificial Analysis rates it 13.8 on the Intelligence Index, with 31.1 for coding and 1.6 for agentic tasks. Against its lowest blended price of $0.375 per 1M, that is roughly 37 index points per dollar, which is the value ratio the leaderboards rank on. Median output speed is 739 tokens per second, with 4.7s to the first token.
The context window is 128,000 tokens, with an output limit of 50,000 tokens. It supports reasoning, tool use, and structured output. Its training knowledge cuts off at 2025-01-01.
Quality is independently evaluated by Artificial Analysis. Speed/latency are model-level medians.
| Provider | Tier | Input | Output | Cache read | Cache write | Context | Output limit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NanoGPT | Gateway | $0.25 | $0.75 | $0.025 | — | 128,000 | 50,000 | |
| OpenRouter | Gateway | $0.25 | $0.75 | $0.025 | — | 128,000 | 50,000 | |
| Vercel AI Gateway | Cloud | $0.25 | $0.75 | $0.025 | — | 128,000 | 50,000 | |
| InceptionOfficial | Gateway | $0.25 | $0.75 | $0.025 | — | 128,000 | 50,000 | |
| Kilo Gateway | Gateway | $0.25 | $0.75 | $0.025 | — | 128,000 | 50,000 | |
| Venice AI | Gateway | $0.31 | $0.94 | $0.031 | — | 128,000 | 50,000 |
Sorted by blended price (input×0.75 + output×0.25) asc. The official channel always shows regardless of rank. Whether a gateway's low price is actually usable can't be verified.
1 / 6 providers expose no reasoning control (reasoning_options: []).
Individual evaluations run by Artificial Analysis, on the same reasoning tier as the intelligence score above. Each benchmark has its own task set and harness, so rows are not comparable with one another. The Intelligence Index above draws on a different, newer set of evaluations.