ByteDance Seed Seed-2.0-Mini vs Inception Mercury 3
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Both cost about the same at a typical 3:1 input/output mix.
- Mercury 3 accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 262K tokens.
- Mercury 3 is the newer model (released 2026-10-16).
| Seed-2.0-Mini | Mercury 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ByteDance Seed | Inception |
| Released | 2026-02-26 | 2026-10-16 |
| Input / 1M | $0.10 | $0.10 |
| Output / 1M | $0.40 | $0.35 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.01 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.175 | $0.163 |
| Context | 262K | 1M |
| Max output | 131K | 131K |
| Accepts | text, image, video | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.40 | $0.35 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.93% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Seed-2.0-Mini
$12.00 per month$0.40 per day
Mercury 3
$11.25 per month$0.38 per day
Mercury 3 saves $0.75 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Seed-2.0-Mini with