Inception Mercury 2.5 vs Z.ai GLM 5.3 Flash
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
- GLM 5.3 Flash is 1.3× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- GLM 5.3 Flash accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 260K tokens.
| Mercury 2.5 | GLM 5.3 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Inception | Z.ai |
| Released | 2026-09-08 | 2026-08-26 |
| Input / 1M | $0.04 | $0.048 |
| Output / 1M | $0.15 | $0.07 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.0040 | $0.03 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.068 | $0.053 |
| Context | 260K | 1M |
| Max output | 66K | 131K |
| Accepts | text | text, image, video |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 40 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.15 | $0.07 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 99.93% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | 1453 ±77 |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Mercury 2.5
$4.65 per month$0.15 per day
GLM 5.3 Flash
$3.91 per month$0.13 per day
GLM 5.3 Flash saves $0.74 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Mercury 2.5 with