Inkling Small vs Mercury 3 compared — price per token, context window, multimodality, openness and which to choose. Can the open-source model replace the paid one? Full 2026 breakdown.
Prices & specs refreshed from live data · olud.ai
Open-model prices = cheapest provider via OpenRouter; official maker rates may be higher.
| Spec | Inkling Small | Mercury 3 | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maker | Thinkingmachines | Inception | – |
| Type | Open-weight | Proprietary | THInkling Small |
| Context window | 524K tokens | 1M tokens | INMercury 3 |
| Input price | $0.45/M · free self-host | $0.1/M | INMercury 3 |
| Output price | $1.2/M · free self-host | $0.35/M | INMercury 3 |
| Vision / multimodal | Yes | No | THInkling Small |
| Tool / function calling | Yes | Yes | = Tie |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No (API only) | THInkling Small |
| License | Open weights | Proprietary | THInkling Small |
Mercury 3 is ~3.4× cheaper than Inkling Small on output tokens ($0.35 vs $1.2 per M tokens).
| Capability | Inkling Small | Mercury 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Open weights (downloadable) | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | ✗ |
| Runs fully offline | ✓ | ✗ |
| Vision / multimodal | ✓ | ✗ |
| Tool / function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| 1M+ context window | ✗ | ✓ |
Independent benchmark scores measured by Artificial Analysis. Higher is better (except latency).
Benchmark data by Artificial Analysis.
| Criterion | Inkling Small | Mercury 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Cost-efficiency | 4.5 | 5.0 |
| Context window | 4.5 | 5.0 |
| Openness | 5.0 | 1.5 |
| Self-hosting | 5.0 | 1.0 |
| Multimodality | 5.0 | 3.5 |
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.
Inkling Small is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Thinking Machines Lab, with 12B active parameters out of 276B total. It is positioned as the smaller, more efficient member of...
Mercury 3 is a diffusion-based language model from Inception, and the lab's most capable model to date. It is suited for agentic workflows and real-time applications where latency compounds, such...
These variants are tracked but not compared here — one page per family keeps the comparison readable.
Inkling Small is open-weight and competitive on many tasks, but Mercury 3 may still lead on the hardest reasoning and agentic work. The gap keeps narrowing — benchmark both on your actual use case before deciding.
Yes. Inkling Small has open weights, so you can self-host it on your own GPUs or run it via a low-cost API. Mercury 3 is API-only and cannot be self-hosted.
Choose Inkling Small if you want to self-host, keep your data private and skip per-token fees — it's open-weight and runs on your own hardware. Choose Mercury 3 if you want frontier capability through a managed API with zero infrastructure to run.
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