# Inception's Mercury 2.5 Diffusion LLM Lists at $0.20/$0.75 per 1M Tokens, 80% Off at Launch

Inception released Mercury 2.5, a diffusion language model, at $0.20 input and $0.75 output per 1M tokens, discounted 80% to $0.04 and $0.15 at launch with no end date. Inception claims a 260K-token context, 1,107 tokens per second and a 40% intelligence gain over Mercury 2. Every figure is Inception's own.

By Neomanex. Updated 2026-10-12.

Our verdict on [Mercury 2.5](/models/mercury-2-5) is **Conditional**: test it if your workload is high-volume and latency-bound, where raw speed is the reason to pick it, and the launch discount makes that test nearly free. Inception has given no end date for the discount, so price anything long-running at the list rate.

## What happened

Inception published "Introducing Mercury 2.5", signed by CEO Stefano Ermon. Mercury generates text by diffusion rather than one token at a time, and Inception calls 2.5 "the most capable diffusion LLM on the market".

- **Price.** "$0.20 per million input and $0.75 per million output". "At launch, Mercury 2.5 is 80% off", which brings it to $0.04 input and $0.15 output.
- **Context.** 260K tokens.
- **Speed.** "1,107 tokens per second on widely-available NVIDIA GPUs".
- **Where.** "Mercury models are available through our Inception API, Baseten, and OpenRouter."

## Why it matters

Inception says Mercury 2.5 is a "40% increase in intelligence from Mercury 2" and places it as comparable to "cost-optimized frontier models like GPT-5.6 Luna (Low), Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, and Claude Haiku 4.5". The post names no benchmark scores for either claim; it says the team used customer feedback and production failure cases to sharpen its evals. We have not run it.

For scale, [Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite](/models/gemini-3-5-flash-lite), one of the models Inception names, lists at $0.30 input and $2.50 output in our directory. If Mercury 2.5 really matches it on quality, its list price is lower on both lines, and its claimed speed is roughly three times the 350 tokens per second we list for Flash-Lite.

## What changes for you

- **Latency-bound, high-volume jobs:** run them through Mercury 2.5 on the Inception API or OpenRouter while the 80% discount lasts.
- **Long-running budgets:** cost them at $0.20/$0.75, not the launch rate.
- **Quality-sensitive work:** treat the "comparable to Flash-Lite and Haiku 4.5" claim as unproven until you test it on your own evals.

## FAQ

**How long does the 80% launch discount last?** Inception gives no end date, so assume it can end at any time.

**Where can I use Mercury 2.5?** Through the Inception API, Baseten and OpenRouter, according to Inception.

Canonical: https://neomanex.com/news/inception-mercury-2-5-diffusion-llm-launch-pricing