Inception lists 6 models and Recursive 1. Below: line-up, price tiers, the cheapest model for each capability, and what each costs for five real workloads.
| Inception | Recursive | |
|---|---|---|
| Models listed | 6 | 1 |
| Models with published pricing | 6 | 1 |
| Typical price (median, 3:1 blend per 1M) | $0.27 | n/a |
| Cheapest paid model | Inception: Mercury 2.5 ($0.07) | n/a |
| Longest context | Inception: Mercury 3 (1M) | Recursive: Flint (free) (262K) |
| Free models | 0 | 1 |
| Newest model | Inception: Mercury 3 (2026-10-16) | Recursive: Flint (free) (2026-10-21) |
| Price changes in the last 90 days | 0 | 0 |
For each workload: the cheapest model from each provider that can actually do it (fits the context window; tool calling required for the agent), and its monthly cost at list price.
| Workload (per month) | Inception | Recursive |
|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation | $6.00 with Inception: Mercury 2.5 | no suitable model |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages | $6.30 with Inception: Mercury 2.5 | no suitable model |
| Coding / tool-using agent 2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context | $6.60 with Inception: Mercury 2.5 | no suitable model |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page | $4.10 with Inception: Mercury 2.5 | no suitable model |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass | $2.15 with Inception: Mercury 2.5 | no suitable model |
| You need | Inception | Recursive |
|---|---|---|
| Any model | Inception: Mercury 2.5 ($0.07) | none listed |
| With tool calling | Inception: Mercury 2.5 ($0.07) | none listed |
| With image input | none listed | none listed |
| With reasoning mode | Inception: Mercury 2.5 ($0.07) | none listed |
| 128K+ context | Inception: Mercury 2.5 ($0.07) | none listed |
| 1M+ context | Inception: Mercury 3 ($0.16) | none listed |
| Model type | Inception | Recursive |
|---|---|---|
| text->text | 6 | 1 |
| Price per 1M (3:1 blend) | Inception | Recursive |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 1 |
| Under $0.50 | 6 | 0 |
| $0.50 – $3 | 0 | 0 |
| $3 – $10 | 0 | 0 |
| $10 and up | 0 | 0 |
It depends on the job: Inception offers the broader line-up (6 models vs 1), Inception the longest context (1M tokens). The workload table above shows which wins for chat, RAG, agents, batch jobs and long documents.
Inception: Inception lists 6 models and Recursive lists 1.
Inception: Inception's longest is Inception: Mercury 3 at 1M tokens; Recursive's is Recursive: Flint (free) at 262K.
Inception: none. Recursive: 1 free model (e.g. Recursive: Flint (free)).
Inception: 0 of 6 models accept images. Recursive: 0 of 1.