Last refreshed 2026-10-19. Next refresh: weekly.
Why use Mercury 3 on OpenRouter?
OpenRouter offers Mercury 3 with pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.10/1M input tokens. OpenRouter is a multi-provider LLM aggregator offering unified API access to 300+ models from all major labs and emerging providers, with automatic failover for reliability.
Compare Mercury 3 across 3 providers to find the best fit for your use caseSetup recipe
Docs fallbackUse the provider REST API or SDKCreate a provider API keymodel: inception/mercury-3inception/mercury-3Request example
inception/mercury-3.Gotchas
- Use provider model ID "inception/mercury-3", not the LLMReference slug "mercury-3".
Compare Mercury 3 Across Providers
| Provider | Input (per 1M) | Output (per 1M) |
|---|---|---|
| Inception | $0.20 | $0.70 |
| OpenRouter | $0.10 | $0.35 |
| Vercel AI Gateway | $0.10 | $0.35 |
Pricing
| Type | Price (per 1M) |
|---|---|
| Input tokens | $0.10 |
| Output tokens | $0.35 |
Capabilities
About Mercury 3
Mercury 3 is Inception's diffusion LLM (dLLM), released 2026-10-19 on the Inception API (model id mercury-3) and through OpenRouter, Baseten and Vercel. It has a 1M-token context window and up to 131,072 output tokens, takes text in and returns text, and supports tool calling and structured outputs via the OpenAI-compatible v1/chat/completions endpoint. Reasoning effort can be set to instant, low, medium or high, and temperature from 0.5 to 1.0. Inception reports 1,068 output tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs and says the model is more than 40x larger in total parameters than Mercury 1 (absolute size not disclosed).