Inception: Mercury 3 vs Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0: Live Promos, Pricing, Hidden Fees & Latency
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.
Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 (amazon/nova-lite-v1) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0: Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 50% (down to 0.03/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Inception: Mercury 3 (API ID: inception/mercury-3) vs Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 (API ID: amazon/nova-lite-v1), Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 offers lower standard input pricing at $0.06/1M tokens ($0.24/1M output), while Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 leads in cached prefix economics at $0.03/1M tokens (50% discount). Inception: Mercury 3 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 3 | Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | inception/mercury-3 | amazon/nova-lite-v1 | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0.1 / $0.35 | $0.06 / $0.24 | Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0.05/1M (50% Off) | $0.03/1M (50% Off) | Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0 |
| Context Window / Max Output | 977K In / 128K Out | 293K In / 5K Out | Inception: Mercury 3 |
| P90 First-Token / Edge Latency | 280ms | 280ms | Inception: Mercury 3 (-0ms) |
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
Amazon Nova Lite 1.0 is a very low-cost multimodal model from Amazon that focused on fast processing of image, video, and text inputs to generate text output. Amazon Nova Lite...
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 3 to Amazon: Nova Lite 1.0
Amazon Nova Lite 1.0 is a very low-cost multimodal model from Amazon that focused on fast processing of image, video, and text inputs to generate text output. Amazon Nova Lite... Verified P90 latency of 280ms.