Inception: Mercury 2 vs Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B: Live Promos, Pricing, Hidden Fees & Latency
Inception: Mercury 2 (inception/mercury-2) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Inception: Mercury 2: Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to 0.125/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B (reflection/beam-1.0-501b-a23b) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B: Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to 0.15/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Inception: Mercury 2 (API ID: inception/mercury-2) vs Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B (API ID: reflection/beam-1.0-501b-a23b), Inception: Mercury 2 offers lower standard input pricing at $0.25/1M tokens ($0.75/1M output), while Inception: Mercury 2 leads in cached prefix economics at $0.125/1M tokens (50% discount). Inception: Mercury 2 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 | Inception: Mercury 2 | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | inception/mercury-2 | reflection/beam-1.0-501b-a23b | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0.25 / $0.75 | $0.3 / $1 | Inception: Mercury 2 |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0.125/1M (50% Off) | $0.15/1M (50% Off) | Inception: Mercury 2 |
| Context Window / Max Output | 125K In / 49K Out | 1024K In / 922K Out | Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B |
| P90 First-Token / Edge Latency | 280ms | 280ms | Inception: Mercury 2 (-0ms) |
Mercury 2 is an extremely fast reasoning LLM, and the first reasoning diffusion LLM (dLLM). Instead of generating tokens sequentially, Mercury 2 produces and refines multiple token
Beam 1.0 is Reflection's open-weight reasoning model for coding and long-horizon agentic workflows. It uses a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture with 501B total and 23B active
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 Inception: Mercury 2 to Reflection: Beam 1.0 501B A23B
Beam 1.0 is Reflection's open-weight reasoning model for coding and long-horizon agentic workflows. It uses a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture with 501B total and 23B active Verified P90 latency of 280ms.