Mercury 3 API: Price & Cheapest Access (Oct 2026)

Mercury 3 is a diffusion-based LLM from Inception, released on October 19, 2026. It achieves performance on par with or better than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 across benchmarks while delivering 4–8× higher speed at over 1,000 tokens per second and a 1-million-token context window. (Sources: Inception announcement, Unite.ai coverage)

Pricing

Prices as of October 24, 2026, source: qubax.ai/price-index

Provider	Input ($/1M)	Output ($/1M)
Qubax	0.075	0.2625
OpenRouter	0.10	0.35

Qubax provides the lowest price for Mercury 3.

Start using Mercury 3 now

How to Use Mercury 3

import os
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key=os.getenv("QUBAX_API_KEY"),
    base_url="https://api.qubax.ai/v1",
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="mercury-3",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain how diffusion LLMs generate text in parallel."}]
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Full setup in /docs/quickstart. The model slug is mercury-3.

When to Choose Mercury 3

Choose Mercury 3 for latency-sensitive applications like real-time agents, tutoring, or search where speed >1k tok/s matters. It offers better price/performance than alternatives.

• Vs GLM-5.3: faster inference at lower cost for most workloads.
• Vs DeepSeek V4 Flash: higher quality for agentic tasks while remaining competitive on price.

See live benchmarks on /price-index and our LLM cost audit.

FAQ

What is the price of Mercury 3 on Qubax?

$0.075 per million input tokens and $0.2625 per million output tokens.

What is the context length of Mercury 3?

1 million tokens.

How do I call the Mercury 3 API?

Use the OpenAI Python SDK with base_url="https://api.qubax.ai/v1" and model="mercury-3".

Is Mercury 3 cheaper than on OpenRouter?

Yes — Qubax is 25% lower on both input and output pricing.

What makes Mercury 3 different from traditional LLMs?

It is a diffusion LLM that generates and refines many tokens in parallel through iterative denoising instead of sequential next-token prediction.

Get API access to Mercury 3

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Originally published at qubax.ai. Qubax gives you every top AI model with one API key, cheaper than OpenRouter.