IBM Granite 4.2 8B vs Inception Mercury 2.5
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
- Mercury 2.5 is 1.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Mercury 2.5 accepts longer prompts: 260K vs 131K tokens.
| Granite 4.2 8B | Mercury 2.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | IBM | Inception |
| Released | 2026-08-31 | 2026-09-08 |
| Input / 1M | $0.06 | $0.04 |
| Output / 1M | $0.15 | $0.15 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.015 | $0.0040 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.082 | $0.068 |
| Context | 131K | 260K |
| Max output | 118K | 66K |
| Accepts | text | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 2 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.15 | $0.15 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.93% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Granite 4.2 8B
$5.85 per month$0.20 per day
Mercury 2.5
$4.65 per month$0.15 per day
Mercury 2.5 saves $1.20 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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