AI Models · Paid vs Paid

o1 Paid vs INMercury 2.5 Paid

o1 vs Mercury 2.5 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Full 2026 breakdown.

Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai

Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.

o1PaidOpenAI
$15 /M input
$60 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
TypeProprietary
Context window200K tokens
MultimodalYes
Self-hostNo
INMercury 2.5PaidInception
$0.04 /M input
$0.15 /M outputManaged API (no infra to run)
TypeProprietary
Context window260K tokens
MultimodalNo
Self-hostNo
Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $60/M). It also gives you the larger 260K context window.

o1 vs Mercury 2.5 specs

Speco1Mercury 2.5Winner
MakerOpenAIInception
TypeProprietaryProprietary
Context window200K tokens260K tokensINMercury 2.5
Input price$15/M$0.04/MINMercury 2.5
Output price$60/M$0.15/MINMercury 2.5
Vision / multimodalYesNoo1
Tool / function callingYesYes= Tie
Self-hostableNo (API only)No (API only)
LicenseProprietaryProprietary

Price gap & when to choose each

400×cheaper per output token

Mercury 2.5 is ~400× cheaper than o1 on output tokens ($0.15 vs $60 per M tokens).

Choose o1 if…
  • You want frontier performance through a managed API
  • You value reliability & ecosystem
  • You don't want to manage infrastructure
INChoose Mercury 2.5 if…
  • You want frontier performance through a managed API
  • You need the longer 260K context window
  • You want the lower output price
  • You value reliability & ecosystem
  • You don't want to manage infrastructure

Feature comparison

Capabilityo1Mercury 2.5
Open weights (downloadable)
Self-hostable
Runs fully offline
Vision / multimodal
Tool / function calling
1M+ context window

Benchmarks: o1 vs Mercury 2.5

Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).

o1
Mercury 2.5
Intelligence index
15.2
Coding index
39.7
GPQA
74.7%
MMLU-Pro
84.1%
Humanity's Last Exam
7%
Long Context Reasoning
65%
LiveCodeBench
67.9%
MATH-500
97%
AIME
72.3%
IFBench
70.3%
τ²-Bench
62.6%
Terminal-Bench Hard
12.9%
Speed
0 tok/s
Latency
0s
Intelligence per $
0.6

Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.

How o1 and Mercury 2.5 score

🏆 Best value & openness: Mercury 2.5 (3.0 vs 2.7 / 5)
Criteriono1Mercury 2.5
Cost-efficiency2.05.0
Context window4.04.0
Openness1.51.5
Self-hosting1.01.0
Multimodality5.03.5

Scores come from live data — output price (cost), context length, open vs closed weights (openness & self-hosting) and vision/tool support (multimodality). Raw task quality isn't scored here; it depends on your benchmark — see the verdict.

What each model is

o1 Paid

OpenAI · Proprietary

The latest and strongest model family from OpenAI, o1 is designed to spend more time thinking before responding. The o1 model series is trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to reason...

Mercury 2.5 Paid

Inception · Proprietary

Mercury 2.5 is the fastest reasoning LLM, and the latest diffusion LLM (dLLM) from Inception. Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2.5 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...

Frequently asked questions

o1 vs Mercury 2.5 — which is cheaper?

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on output ($0.15/M vs $60/M).

Which has the larger context window?

Mercury 2.5 offers the larger context window (260K tokens).

o1 vs Mercury 2.5 — which should I pick in 2026?

Choose Mercury 2.5 for the lower output price ($0.15/M vs $60/M). It also gives you the larger 260K context window.

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