Inception: Mercury 3 vs Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free): 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.
Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) (thinkingmachines/inkling-small:free) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (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.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Inception: Mercury 3 (API ID: inception/mercury-3) vs Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) (API ID: thinkingmachines/inkling-small:free), Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) offers lower standard input pricing at $0/1M tokens ($0/1M output), while Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) leads in cached prefix economics at $0/1M 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 | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | inception/mercury-3 | thinkingmachines/inkling-small:free | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0.1 / $0.35 | $0 / $0 | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0.05/1M (50% Off) | $0/1M (50% Off) | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) |
| Context Window / Max Output | 977K In / 128K Out | 1024K In / 256K Out | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free) |
| 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
Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free)
API ID: thinkingmachines/inkling-small:free • Live RegistryInkling Small is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Thinking Machines Lab, with 12B active parameters out of 276B total. It is positioned as the smaller, more
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 Thinking Machines: Inkling Small (free)
Inkling Small is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Thinking Machines Lab, with 12B active parameters out of 276B total. It is positioned as the smaller, more Verified P90 latency of 280ms.