Cohere: North Mini Code (free) vs Inception: Mercury 3: Live Promos, Pricing, Hidden Fees & Latency
Cohere: North Mini Code (free) (cohere/north-mini-code:free) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Cohere: North Mini Code (free): Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to 0/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
Inception: Mercury 3 (inception/mercury-3) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Inception: Mercury 3: Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to 0.05/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Cohere: North Mini Code (free) (API ID: cohere/north-mini-code:free) vs Inception: Mercury 3 (API ID: inception/mercury-3), Cohere: North Mini Code (free) offers lower standard input pricing at $0/1M tokens ($0/1M output), while Cohere: North Mini Code (free) leads in cached prefix economics at $0/1M tokens (50% discount). Cohere: North Mini Code (free) achieves a 0ms faster P90 time-to-first-token latency (280ms vs 280ms).
Auto-discovered via live global telemetry registry.
Auto-discovered via live global telemetry registry.
| Specification / FinOps Dimension | Cohere: North Mini Code (free) | Inception: Mercury 3 | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | cohere/north-mini-code:free | inception/mercury-3 | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0 / $0 | $0.1 / $0.35 | Cohere: North Mini Code (free) |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0/1M (50% Off) | $0.05/1M (50% Off) | Cohere: North Mini Code (free) |
| Context Window / Max Output | 250K In / 63K Out | 977K In / 128K Out | Inception: Mercury 3 |
| P90 First-Token / Edge Latency | 280ms | 280ms | Cohere: North Mini Code (free) (-0ms) |
North Mini Code is Cohere's first agentic coding model and the debut of its North family. A sparse mixture-of-experts model with 30B total parameters and 3B active, it is optimized
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
Real-Time Stack Cost & Hidden-Fee Simulator (MAU / Token / Egress / GMV)
Calibrated with Reddit r/FinOps & r/devops telemetry: Includes Context Caching, Bandwidth Egress, and MoR Tax
🛰️Switch from Cohere: North Mini Code (free) to Inception: Mercury 3
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 Verified P90 latency of 280ms.