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
Inception: Mercury 3
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$2.86
$14.50
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $11.64
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$4.34
$15.50
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $11.16
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)
$4.36
$16.20
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $11.84
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$2.88
$10.10
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $7.22
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$1.77
$5.35
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash saves $3.58
Capabilities side by side
Capability
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
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
2026-10-20
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.04
$0.01
2026-10-19
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.05
$0.12
2026-10-18
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.07
$0.14
2026-10-17
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.03
$0.14
2026-10-16
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.01
$0.68
2026-10-15
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.02
$0.89
2026-10-14
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.04
$0.60
2026-10-06
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
$0.30
$1.20
Which should you choose?
Choose DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash if…
cost matters at scale — it is 82% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($2.86 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 944K tokens (about 707,800 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 better than Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash comes out ahead on the data we track: 5 advantages and none for Inception: Mercury 3.
Which is cheaper, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash or Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is cheaper: $0.03 vs $0.16 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 82% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $2.86 against $14.50.
How much do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Inception: Mercury 3 cost per million tokens?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.04 per 1M input tokens and $0.01 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 or Inception: Mercury 3?
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 1.0M tokens, about 1,573 pages, against 1M (about 1,500 pages) for Inception: Mercury 3.
Do DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Inception: Mercury 3 support function calling and JSON output?
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...