GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2

    Comparison

    As of August 25, 2026, Mercury 2 is 91% cheaper per million tokens than GPT-5.1 Medium. GPT-5.1 Medium is $1.25 / $10.00 per million input/output tokens versus Mercury 2 at $0.25 / $0.75. Sources: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing

    Sources: OpenAI API pricing (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing); AnotherWrapper LLM pricing (https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing)

    GPT-5.1 Medium

    OpenAI

    $11.25blended / 1M

    Input

    $1.25

    Output

    $10.00

    400K ctx|Proprietary
    91%
    cheaper
    Better value

    Mercury 2

    Inception

    $1.00blended / 1M

    Input

    $0.25

    Output

    $0.75

    128K ctx|Proprietary
    Save $10.25 per million tokens by choosing Mercury 2 over GPT-5.1 Medium.

    GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2 comparison

    Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side

    Shared benchmarks

    Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.

    Score vs price

    AIME 2025. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.

    Best score at each priceGPT-5.1 MediumMercury 2
    Metric
    GPT-5.1 Medium
    Mercury 2
    Provider
    Provider
    OpenAI
    Inception
    License
    Proprietary
    Proprietary
    Release Date
    2025-11-12
    2026-02-24
    Pricing (per 1M tokens)
    Input Price+400%
    $1.25
    $0.25
    Output Price+1233%
    $10.00
    $0.75
    Blended (1M + 1M)
    $11.25
    $1.00
    Model Details
    Context Window
    400K
    128K
    Max Output Tokens
    128K
    8.2K
    Knowledge Cutoff
    N/A
    N/A
    Throughput
    90 tok/s
    1009 tok/s
    Benchmarks
    74%
    38%
    71%
    98.4%
    91.1%
    0.8%
    Benchmark Wins
    GPT-5.1 Medium 2|0 Mercury 2

    Verdict

    GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2: the bottom line

    Mercury 2 offers significantly lower pricing, while GPT-5.1 Medium leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.

    GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2 FAQ

    Which is cheaper, GPT-5.1 Medium or Mercury 2?

    As of August 25, 2026, Mercury 2 is 91% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Mercury 2 costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $0.75 per million output tokens ($1.00 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). GPT-5.1 Medium costs $1.25 / $10.00 per million tokens ($11.25 blended). Sources: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.

    How much does GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2 cost per million tokens?

    GPT-5.1 Medium OpenAI API pricing is $1.25 input and $10.00 output per million tokens via OpenAI. Mercury 2 Inception API pricing is $0.25 input and $0.75 output per million tokens via Inception. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.

    Which is better for coding, GPT-5.1 Medium or Mercury 2?

    Mercury 2 has a published LiveCodeBench score of 67%. GPT-5.1 Medium does not have that eval on this page yet.

    What is the context window for GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2?

    GPT-5.1 Medium supports a 400K token context window, while Mercury 2 supports 128K tokens. GPT-5.1 Medium offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.

    Which model performs better on benchmarks, GPT-5.1 Medium or Mercury 2?

    GPT-5.1 Medium leads on 2 of 2 shared benchmarks versus Mercury 2's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.

    Is GPT-5.1 Medium or Mercury 2 better for production use?

    Both GPT-5.1 Medium and Mercury 2 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Mercury 2 has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.

    Can I switch between GPT-5.1 Medium and Mercury 2 in my app?

    Yes. Call GPT-5.1 Medium through OpenAI and Mercury 2 through Inception with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.

    How accurate is this GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2 pricing data?

    List rates are the latest published OpenAI API pricing and Inception API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.

    What is the output token limit for GPT-5.1 Medium and Mercury 2?

    GPT-5.1 Medium supports up to 128K output tokens per request, while Mercury 2 supports up to 8K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.

    Which model has better throughput, GPT-5.1 Medium or Mercury 2?

    GPT-5.1 Medium runs at approximately 90 tokens/second while Mercury 2 runs at 1009 tokens/second. Mercury 2 is faster in raw throughput. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.

    How do I switch the models in this GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2 comparison?

    Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open GPT-5.1 Medium or Mercury 2 from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.

    GPT-5.1 Medium vs Mercury 2 pricing

    This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. GPT-5.1 Medium costs $1.25/M input and $10.00/M output. Mercury 2 costs $0.25/M input and $0.75/M output.

    Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.

    The index

    All Large Language Models

    280 models across 33 providers. Search or jump to a lab — every model page stays linked here.

    Baidu

    1 models

    Inception

    0 models

    inclusionAI

    1 models

    LG AI Research

    1 models

    Nous Research

    1 models

    Sakana AI

    1 models

    StepFun

    1 models

    Tencent

    1 models

    Thinking Machines

    1 models

    Unisound

    1 models

    Upstage

    1 models

    Next step

    You found the model. Now ship the product.

    Auth, billing, and the API layer are already decided. Fork 8 finished AI apps, or have us build the first version with you.