Which is cheaper, Magistral Small 2506 or Mercury 2?
As of August 30, 2026, Mercury 2 is 50% 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). Magistral Small 2506 costs $0.50 / $1.50 per million tokens ($2.00 blended). Sources: https://mistral.ai/technology/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 Magistral Small 2506 vs Mercury 2 cost per million tokens?
Magistral Small 2506 Mistral API pricing is $0.50 input and $1.50 output per million tokens via Mistral AI. 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, Magistral Small 2506 or Mercury 2?
Mercury 2 leads on LiveCodeBench: Magistral Small 2506 at 51.3% vs Mercury 2 at 67%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
What is the context window for Magistral Small 2506 vs Mercury 2?
Magistral Small 2506 supports a 40K token context window, while Mercury 2 supports 128K tokens. Mercury 2 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, Magistral Small 2506 or Mercury 2?
Mercury 2 leads on 3 of 3 shared benchmarks versus Magistral Small 2506'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 Magistral Small 2506 or Mercury 2 better for production use?
Both Magistral Small 2506 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 Magistral Small 2506 and Mercury 2 in my app?
Yes. Call Magistral Small 2506 through Mistral AI 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 Magistral Small 2506 vs Mercury 2 pricing data?
List rates are the latest published Mistral API pricing and Inception API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://mistral.ai/technology/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 Magistral Small 2506 and Mercury 2?
Magistral Small 2506 supports up to an unspecified number of 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, Magistral Small 2506 or Mercury 2?
Mercury 2 has a measured throughput of approximately 1009 tokens/second. Throughput data for Magistral Small 2506 is not yet available. 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 Magistral Small 2506 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 Magistral Small 2506 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.
