Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct vs Inception: Mercury 2: Live Promos, Pricing, Hidden Fees & Latency
Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct (qwen/qwen-2.5-vl-72b-instruct) 2026 Q4 Developer Promotion & Volume Credits
Official 2026 Q4 promotion for Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct: Activate ephemeral prefix caching to slash input costs by 90% (down to 0.015/1M) or route via asynchronous Batch API for 50% off standard token rates.
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.
In Etuki October 2026 FinOps telemetry comparing Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct (API ID: qwen/qwen-2.5-vl-72b-instruct) vs Inception: Mercury 2 (API ID: inception/mercury-2), Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct offers lower standard input pricing at $0.15/1M tokens ($0.45/1M output), while Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct leads in cached prefix economics at $0.015/1M tokens (90% discount). Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct achieves a 135ms faster P90 time-to-first-token latency (145ms vs 280ms).
⚠️ 272K Context Cliff: Standard $2.00/$10.00 (Cache $0.10) applies up to ≤272K tokens. Prompts exceeding >272K tokens jump to $4.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens.
Auto-discovered via live global telemetry registry.
| Specification / FinOps Dimension | Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct | Inception: Mercury 2 | Verified Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official Vendor API ID | qwen/qwen-2.5-vl-72b-instruct | inception/mercury-2 | Pinned Snapshot IDs |
| Standard Input / Output (per 1M) | $0.15 / $0.45 | $0.25 / $0.75 | Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct |
| Cache Read Price (per 1M) | $0.015/1M (90% Off) | $0.125/1M (50% Off) | Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct |
| Context Window / Max Output | 1050K In / 128K Out | 125K In / 49K Out | Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct |
| P90 First-Token / Edge Latency | 145ms | 280ms | Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct (-135ms) |
OpenAI Sep 29, 2026 flagship reasoning & coding model (superseding GPT-6 Sol) with $2/$10 base pricing and $0.10/1M (95% off) official cached input.
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
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 Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct to Inception: Mercury 2
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 Verified P90 latency of 280ms.