Inception Mercury 2.5 vs PrismML Ternary Bonsai 2 9B
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 1.4× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Both accept prompts up to 260K tokens.
- Mercury 2.5's best provider was more reliable over 24 h: 99.93% vs 99.39%.
- Ternary Bonsai 2 9B is the newer model (released 2026-10-16).
| Mercury 2.5 | Ternary Bonsai 2 9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Inception | PrismML |
| Released | 2026-09-08 | 2026-10-16 |
| Input / 1M | $0.04 | $0.08 |
| Output / 1M | $0.15 | $0.13 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.0040 | $0.04 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.068 | $0.092 |
| Context | 260K | 262K |
| Max output | 66K | 66K |
| Accepts | text | text, image |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.15 | $0.13 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 99.93% | 99.39% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Mercury 2.5
$4.65 per month$0.15 per day
Ternary Bonsai 2 9B
$6.75 per month$0.23 per day
Mercury 2.5 saves $2.10 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Mercury 2.5 with
Compare Ternary Bonsai 2 9B with