Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch)
Inception: Mercury 3
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$8.75
$14.50
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $5.75
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$8.50
$15.50
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $7.00
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$9.00
$16.20
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $7.20
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$5.50
$10.10
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $4.60
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$2.75
$5.35
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) saves $2.60
Capabilities side by side
Capability
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch)
Inception: Mercury 3
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
✓ Yes
—
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
✓ Yes
—
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
✓ Yes
—
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
—
—
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
—
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch): price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-08.
Inception: Mercury 3: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-20.
Which should you choose?
Choose Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) if…
cost matters at scale — it is 38% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($8.75 vs $14.50 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need image input — to read screenshots, charts and scanned pages; Inception: Mercury 3 does not advertise it
you need file / PDF input — to accept documents without your own parsing step; Inception: Mercury 3 does not advertise it
you need built-in web search — to answer from live web results; Inception: Mercury 3 does not advertise it
Choose Inception: Mercury 3 if…
No advantage on the data we track — pick it for provider preference or output quality on your own prompts.
Frequently asked questions
Is Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) better than Inception: Mercury 3?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) comes out ahead on the data we track: 4 advantages and none for Inception: Mercury 3.
Which is cheaper, Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) is cheaper: $0.10 vs $0.16 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 38% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $8.75 against $14.50.
How much do Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3 cost per million tokens?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) costs $0.05 per 1M input tokens and $0.25 per 1M output tokens; Inception: Mercury 3 costs $0.10 input and $0.35 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3?
Both take 1M tokens per request — roughly 1,500 pages of text.
Do Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3 support function calling and JSON output?
Can Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3 read images?
Only Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) accepts image input; Inception: Mercury 3 is text-only for input.
Is Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3 free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; Inception: Mercury 3 up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
When were Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3 released?
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 5.5 (batch) was listed on 2026-10-07; Inception: Mercury 3 on 2026-10-16.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's small, fast model for high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summarization, subagents, and browser use. It succeeds Claude Haiku 4.5 with stronger coding, computer use, and...
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...