Mercury 3
Strong value for high-volume usage.
Overview
Mercury 3 was released on 19 October 2026. Unlike classic models that write one token after another, it produces and refines several tokens at once, which explains its claimed speed of 1,068 tokens per second on NVIDIA GPUs. Inception says it is more than 40 times larger than Mercury 1 and raises the context to one million tokens, up from 260,000 for Mercury 2.5. It is available by API (model ID mercury-3) from Inception and several distributors. Launch pricing is $0.10 input and $0.35 output per million tokens, half the regular $0.20 / $0.70 rate, with no announced end date. Published performance figures are vendor-measured and not yet independently reproduced. Target uses: voice agents, real-time search, customer support, anything latency-bound.
Skill profile
Not disclosed
Strengths
- Very long context
- Competitive input pricing
Limitations
- No documented EU residency
Who is it for
- you want to control cost or self-host
- you handle sensitive data with no EU option
Access & availability
Key specifications
What it costs per month
Estimate from sourced API prices and a hardware tier for self-hosting. Assumptions are editable.
Assumptions: 36-month amortisation, 0.25 €/kWh, 22 days/month, 1 $ = 0.92 €. Excludes labour, software licences, redundancy.
nAIvigate Trust Index
What the vendor offers and documents for professional use in Europe. An undocumented criterion counts as zero and stays visible: the score rises when the vendor publishes, not when we assume.
8/20 criteria documented · 40 % · provisional: 50 % documented criteria or fewer
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[](https://naivigate.com/en/model/mercury-3)Data & compliance
What we know, line by line, with source and date. These lines feed the Data and Enterprise families of the Trust Index above. GDPR compliance depends on your processing, not on the model alone.
| EU data residency | Not documented |
| Data processing agreement (DPA) | Not documented |
| Transfer outside the EU | Not documented |
| Training on your data | Not documented |
| Configurable retention | Not documented |
| Zero Data Retention | Not documented |
| Self-hostable | No |
| Declared hosting | US |
Quality of this card’s data
This score measures the quality of the data on this card: price, context, Elo, licence, documented, sourced and fresh. It measures neither the model nor its compliance: for that, see the Trust Index above.
3/6 documented · 1/6 primary sources
Advanced data · for expertsArchitecture, modalities, detailed cost, full benchmarks▾
| Arena Elo | — |
| MMLU | — |
| GPQA | — |
| HumanEval | — |
| SWE-Bench | — |
| MATH | — |