Inception Mercury 2.5 vs inclusionAI Ling 3.0 Flash VL
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 1.3× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Mercury 2.5 accepts longer prompts: 260K vs 131K tokens.
| Mercury 2.5 | Ling 3.0 Flash VL | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Inception | inclusionAI |
| Released | 2026-09-08 | 2026-09-10 |
| Input / 1M | $0.04 | $0.06 |
| Output / 1M | $0.15 | $0.18 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.0040 | $0.012 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.068 | $0.09 |
| Context | 260K | 131K |
| Max output | 66K | 33K |
| Accepts | text | text, image, video |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.15 | $0.18 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.71% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Mercury 2.5
$4.65 per month$0.15 per day
Ling 3.0 Flash VL
$6.30 per month$0.21 per day
Mercury 2.5 saves $1.65 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Mercury 2.5 with