Last refreshed 2026-10-19. Next refresh: weekly.
Why use Mercury 3 on Vercel AI Gateway?
Vercel AI Gateway offers Mercury 3 with pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.10/1M input tokens. Vercel AI Gateway is a unified AI proxy providing a single OpenAI-compatible API endpoint to 275+ models from 25+ providers including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI, Alibaba, Amazon, ByteDance, Cohere, MiniMax, MoonshotAI, KwaiPilot, Black Forest Labs, Recraft, Voyage AI, NVIDIA, and more.
Compare Mercury 3 across 3 providers to find the best fit for your use caseSetup recipe
Python + curlpip install openaiexport AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY=...import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key=os.environ["AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY"],inception/mercury-3Request example
import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key=os.environ["AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY"],
base_url="https://ai-gateway.vercel.sh/v1"
)
response = client.chat.completions.create(
model="inception/mercury-3",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)Gotchas
- Use provider model ID "inception/mercury-3", not the LLMReference slug "mercury-3".
- creator/model-name e.g. kwaipilot/kat-coder-pro-v2
- The examples expect AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY; rename it only if your application config maps the new variable.
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).