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)
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch)
Inception: Mercury 3
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$6.75
$14.50
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) saves $7.75
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$7.50
$15.50
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) saves $8.00
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)
$7.80
$16.20
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) saves $8.40
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$4.90
$10.10
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) saves $5.20
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$2.65
$5.35
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) saves $2.70
Capabilities side by side
Capability
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (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
—
—
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
—
—
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
✓ Yes
—
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
✓ Yes
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Inception: Mercury 3: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-20.
Date
Model
Input / 1M
Output / 1M
2026-10-17
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch)
$0.05
$0.15
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) if…
cost matters at scale — it is 54% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($6.75 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 seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Inception: Mercury 3 does not advertise it
you need log-probabilities — to read token confidence for classification and scoring; Inception: Mercury 3 does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 384K tokens (about 288,000 words) per response
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 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) better than Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) comes out ahead on the data we track: 5 advantages and none for Inception: Mercury 3.
Which is cheaper, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) is cheaper: $0.08 vs $0.16 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 54% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $6.75 against $14.50.
How much do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3 cost per million tokens?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) costs $0.05 per 1M input tokens and $0.15 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, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch): 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Inception: Mercury 3.
Do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3 support function calling and JSON output?
Can DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3 read images?
Only DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) accepts image input; Inception: Mercury 3 is text-only for input.
Is DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (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 DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) can write up to 384K tokens (about 288,000 words) per response; Inception: Mercury 3 up to 131K (about 98,300 words).
When were DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) and Inception: Mercury 3 released?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) was listed on 2026-09-10; Inception: Mercury 3 on 2026-10-16.
Has the price of DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch) or Inception: Mercury 3 changed?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (batch): input price cut 55% ($0.11 → $0.05/1M), output price cut 55% ($0.34 → $0.15/1M) on 2026-10-17. Inception: Mercury 3: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-20.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from DeepSeek, and the first built on the company's Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture. It activates 8B parameters on input and 16B on...
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...