Inception Mercury 3 vs Tencent Hy3
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
- Hy3 is 1.1× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Mercury 3 accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 262K tokens.
- Mercury 3 is the newer model (released 2026-10-16).
| Mercury 3 | Hy3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Inception | Tencent |
| Released | 2026-10-16 | 2026-07-06 |
| Input / 1M | $0.10 | $0.083 |
| Output / 1M | $0.35 | $0.33 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.01 | $0.021 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.163 | $0.144 |
| Context | 1M | 262K |
| Max output | 131K | 128K |
| Accepts | text | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 5 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.35 | $0.33 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 99.93% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Mercury 3
$11.25 per month$0.38 per day
Hy3
$9.90 per month$0.33 per day
Hy3 saves $1.35 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Mercury 3 with