The Known Good Updated 29 Jul 2026
inception ·Proprietary ·Released February 2026·Tracked since 25 Jul 2026

Inception: Mercury 2 — quality, speed & price analysis

Compare with another model Provider benchmarks Data sources
Quality
unranked
Known Good Index
Speed
#7 of 317
279.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#115 of 370
$0.38
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.25 · Out $0.75
Cache hit price
#43 of 238
$0.025
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#304 of 375
128k
tokens (~200 pages)
Summary

Inception: Mercury 2 does not yet carry a Known Good Index score — the index needs at least one science, one mathematics and one coding result. It accepts text input, outputs text, and supports a 128k-token context window.

Pricing is $0.25 per 1M input tokens (below the $2.10 average) and $0.75 per 1M output (below the $9.62 average). Cached input reads at $0.025 per 1M, a 90% discount on its input price. At 280 tokens per second it sits in the fastest quarter of the models we track.

Generated from tracked data on 29 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

Technical specifications
ReasoningYes
Input modalitytext
Output modalitytext
Context window128,000 tokens
Max output50,000 tokens
WeightsProprietary
Knowledge cutoffJanuary 2025
Tool callingYes
Providers1 host · compare →
Highlights — where Inception: Mercury 2 sits
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Quality

How Inception: Mercury 2 compares against every tracked model

Known Good IndexCapability indices
Known Good Index

Composite of GPQA Diamond, Mock AIME 2024–25, MATH Level 5, SWE-bench Verified, LiveBench, Humanity's Last Exam and Terminal-Bench, normalised 0–100. Scores are ingested from their publishers; we do not run these evaluations.

💡 A lightbulb marks a model its provider publishes as a reasoning model
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Inception: Mercury 2 on each evaluation feeding the index, against the tracked average

Evaluation scores

Bar = Inception: Mercury 2 · grey marker = average across tracked models

None of the seven index evaluations have published a score for this model yet.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Text Arena

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena

1358
Elo · 95% CI ±10
#168
of 386 ranked models
3k
votes counted
1347
style-controlled (#193)

Ingested 29 Jul 2026.

The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

BlendedInput vs outputQuality per dollar
Blended Price

USD per 1M tokens at a 3:1 input:output blend. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input tokens accepted

Context windowMax output tokens
Context Window

Maximum input context from provider metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

The Known Good

Speed

Median output throughput across hosting providers

Output speedBy provider

Latency

Time to first token, median across providers

Latency (TTFT)

Seconds to first streamed chunk, median across tracked providers. Derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry. Lower is better.

The Known Good

Providers

Hosts serving Inception: Mercury 2, with their own price and speed

1 provider
Full provider benchmarks →
ProviderInput $/MOutput $/M BlendedSpeedTTFTContext
Inception $0.25 $0.75 $0.38 257 0.7s 128k

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. Speed is output tokens per second; TTFT is time to first token.

The Known Good

History

How price and quality have moved since we began tracking this model

Quality & price over time

Since 25 Jul 2026

Known Good Index
Blended price $0.38 per 1M · observed 29 Jul 2026
Output speed 280 tok/s · observed 29 Jul 2026
Time to first token 0.8s

No recorded changes for this model since tracking began.

The Known Good

Comparisons

Head-to-head pages pairing Inception: Mercury 2 with other tracked models

Head-to-head pages are generated for the top 50 models by Known Good Index, which Inception: Mercury 2 is not currently in. Its nearest tracked models by index are below.

Browse all comparisons →
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Elo — Arena Full attribution →