Neither wins outright: Google: Gemma 4 31B is the pick when you need image input, Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview when cost matters at scale.
| Spec | Google: Gemma 4 31B | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Inception | |
| Input price (per 1M tokens) | $0.20 | $0.04 |
| Output price (per 1M tokens) | $0.40 | $0.15 |
| Blended price (3:1 input/output) | $0.25 | $0.07 |
| Cheaper than … of all models we track | 66% | 85% |
| Context window | 262K tokens (~393 pages) | 260K tokens (~390 pages) |
| Larger context than … of all models | 48% | 47% |
| Max output per response | 16K tokens (~12,300 words) | 66K tokens (~49,200 words) |
| Input types | image, text, video | text |
| Output types | text | text |
| Free variant | Yes | No |
| Listed since | 2026-04-02 | 2026-08-31 |
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) | Google: Gemma 4 31B | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer-support chatbot 50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens) | $23.00 | $6.00 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $17.00 |
| RAG search over documents 20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens) | $28.00 | $6.30 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $21.70 |
| 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) | $28.80 | $6.60 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $22.20 |
| Batch summarisation 10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens) | $18.40 | $4.10 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $14.30 |
| Long-document analysis 500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens) | $10.40 | $2.15 | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview saves $8.25 |
| Capability | Google: Gemma 4 31B | Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview | 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.
| Date | Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-15 | Google: Gemma 4 31B | $0.20 | $0.40 |
| 2026-08-27 | Google: Gemma 4 31B | $0.09 | $0.34 |
| 2026-08-21 | Google: Gemma 4 31B | $0.10 | $0.34 |
| 2026-08-19 | Google: Gemma 4 31B | $0.09 | $0.34 |
Neither wins outright: Google: Gemma 4 31B is the pick when you need image input, Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview when cost matters at scale. In short: Google: Gemma 4 31B when you need image input, you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities, you want to prototype at zero cost; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview when cost matters at scale, you generate long outputs in one go, you want the newer model.
Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper: $0.07 vs $0.25 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 73% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $6.00 against $23.00.
Google: Gemma 4 31B costs $0.20 per 1M input tokens and $0.40 per 1M output tokens; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04 input and $0.15 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Google: Gemma 4 31B: 262K tokens, about 393 pages, against 260K (about 390 pages) for Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview.
Tool calling — Google: Gemma 4 31B: yes, Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Google: Gemma 4 31B: yes, Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: yes.
Only Google: Gemma 4 31B accepts image input; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview is text-only for input.
Google: Gemma 4 31B has a free variant (google/gemma-4-31b-it:free). Free variants usually carry tighter rate limits.
Google: Gemma 4 31B can write up to 16K tokens (about 12,300 words) per response; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview up to 66K (about 49,200 words).
Google: Gemma 4 31B was listed on 2026-04-02; Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview on 2026-08-31.
Google: Gemma 4 31B: input price raised 55% ($0.09 → $0.20/1M), output price raised 15% ($0.34 → $0.40/1M) on 2026-10-15 (4 price changes since 2026-08-06). Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-02.
Gemma 4 31B Instruct is Google DeepMind's 30.7B dense multimodal model supporting text and image input with text output. Features a 256K token context window, configurable thinking/reasoning mode, native function...
Full Google: Gemma 4 31B specs →Mercury 2.5 is the fastest reasoning LLM, and the latest diffusion LLM (dLLM) from Inception. Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2.5 produces and refines multiple tokens in parallel, achieving...
Full Inception: Mercury 2.5 Preview specs →