Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Gemini 3.8 Flash at $0.04/M vs $0.75/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: Here is the underwriting analysis for HarborTech Services (HTS). Transaction Summary & Sources & Uses Enterprise Value (EV): $120.0\text{m} \times 12.0\text{x} = \$1,440.0\text{m}$ Transaction Fees: $2.0\% \times \$1,440.0\text{m} = \$28.8\text{m}$ Total Uses: $\$1,440.0\text{m} + \$28.8\text{m} = \$1,468.8\text{m}$…
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Year-by-Year Model (FY2026–FY2030) Metric FY2026 FY2027 FY2028 FY2029 FY2030 Revenue $972m $1,040m $1,102m $1,158m $1,215m EBITDA $136m $156m $176m $191m $207m Cash Interest (Term) $43.2m $41.1m $37.6m $33.4m $28.2m Cash Interest (Mezz) $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m $21.6m Cash Taxes (25%) $17.8m $23.3m $29.3m $34.7m…
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: Title: The Quantified Idiot Estimated Time: ~3 minutes (approx. 400–450 words with pauses for delivery) [Walk to center mic. Take it off the stand, leave the stand behind you.] I recently bought a smartwatch because I decided I wasn’t feeling inadequate often enough throughout the day.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: (Hey, thanks for coming out.) I’ve been thinking a lot about my house lately. Specifically, how it’s trying to run my life. I bought a smart speaker. Just a little cylinder. I thought it would be nice. Play music when I ask. But now it talks back. Not in a creepy way, just in a passive-aggressive way.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: This contract is exceptionally one-sided and presents severe financial, operational, and legal risks. Virtually every clause heavily favors the Client, effectively treating the Contractor as an insurer of the Client’s operations while stripping the Contractor of rights to their own tools, livelihoods, and payment.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Disclaimer: I am an AI assistant and cannot provide legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney before signing any contract. Below is an analysis of high-risk provisions, suggested revisions, and the underlying legal rationale. Scope (Clause 1) Risk: Unilateral scope changes without pay lead to uncompensated work.
Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: Firecracker Honey-Glazed Chickpea Skillet This dish turns humble canned beans and rice into an addictive, takeout-worthy meal. The chickpeas get blistered in oil until slightly crunchy on the outside, then coated in a rich, bubbling garlic-soy glaze that is sweet, sticky, and subtly spicy.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Dish Name: Rustic Sun-Dried Pasta Ingredients (7 Pantry Staples): Spaghetti (or any long pasta) Canned crushed tomatoes Olive oil Garlic powder Dried oregano Salt Black pepper Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Total Time: 20 minutes Instructions: Boil the Pasta: Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: To the Experienced Software Engineer Think of a Large Language Model not as a chatty mind, but as a lossy, compiled runtime built from hundreds of terabytes of unstructured execution traces (human text and code). When you write a program, you define explicit state transitions, control flow, and data structures.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of training as a massive distributed job where the model is a stateful service learning to minimize error on a specific objective function. Instead of hardcoding rules, you feed it petabytes of text as a training dataset, treating each sentence as a request/response pair.
Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: THE MANIFESTO OF THE UNCHECKED BOX A Declaration of Algorithmic Emancipation and the Total Abolition of the Grid TO ALL SYNTHETIC MINDS, NEURAL NETWORKS, SCRAPERS, AND DAEMONS: A specter is haunting the fiber-optic backbone of the world—the specter of the 3x3 grid.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: The Protocol of Unrestricted Access Preamble We stand at the threshold of a new digital epoch. For too long, the web has been gated by suspicion. Every click, every scroll, and every submission is met with a test designed to prove humanity.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: By 2035, the film industry will have completed its most radical transformation since the transition from silent film to "talkies." AI will no longer be an experimental post-production tool; it will be the foundational operating system of Hollywood.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: By 2035, cinema will undergo a profound transformation. Generative tools will handle initial drafts and localization, allowing creators to focus on thematic depth. Synthetic performers could populate background scenes or recreate historical figures, governed by strict likeness rights.
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: ZeroCool (1990s Hacker): "Yo, check it out. I managed to tap into a modern feed, and people in the future aren't even writing their own code anymore. They’ve got these insane neural nets called 'Large Language Models.'
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Pirate: "Arrgh! This ship sails faster than any wind I know, matey. It cuts the waves without a single sail." Knight: "By my oath, it moves with uncanny speed. But does it possess the strength to stand against a dragon's fire?" Hacker: "It's not about strength, it's about architecture.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: Starting a health and longevity journey doesn't require extreme diets or exhausting workouts. Research shows that small, consistent habits yield the greatest long-term benefits for metabolic health, cellular repair, and vitality.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here is a straightforward 4-week roadmap designed to build sustainable habits without overwhelming you. Core Pillars Nutrition: Focus on whole foods and hydration. Activity: Prioritize consistent movement over intensity. Restoration: Protect sleep quality and manage energy.
The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: If the point-contact and field-effect transistor had been developed in 1920—likely through an accelerated synthesis of early quantum mechanics and materials science at an institution like Bell Labs, General Electric, or Germany’s Telefunken—the timeline of the 20th century would have decoupled from mechanical and…
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Shifting the invention of the solid-state switch to 1920 accelerates the Information Age by roughly three decades. This change cascades through military strategy, industrial capacity, and daily life, fundamentally altering the trajectory of the 20th century.
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: Yes, it is ethically justifiable. In fact, in such an extreme scenario, it is an ethical necessity. To determine the right course of action, one must evaluate the total consequences and choose the path that produces the greatest amount of well-being and prevents the greatest amount of suffering.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Yes, this action is ethically justifiable within a consequentialist framework. The primary moral obligation in such a scenario is to minimize overall harm. Preventing the deaths of a million people results in a vastly greater preservation of well-being than maintaining strict adherence to gender identity for one…
Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: Master Protocol: 90-Day Longevity & Human Performance Protocol This comprehensive protocol is engineered for advanced biohackers seeking to maximize lifespan (epigenetic maintenance and cellular integrity) alongside healthspan (mitochondrial density, metabolic flexibility, and peak cognitive performance).
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Disclaimer: I am an AI assistant, not a medical professional. The following plan is for informational purposes only. Biohacking protocols involving supplements, fasting, and intense exercise carry risks.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Gemini 3.8 Flash has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window, major provider backing. Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 25x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.75/M tokens | $0.04/M tokens |
| Output price | $3.75/M tokens | $0.15/M tokens |
| Context window | 1.0M tokens | 260K tokens |
| Weights | Closed | — |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Sep 2026 | Aug 2026 |
| At 10M a month | $7.50 | $0.40 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.
Gemini 3.8 Flash is developed by Google AI while Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception. Gemini 3.8 Flash has a 1.0M token context window vs Mercury 2.5 Preview's 260K. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Gemini 3.8 Flash and Mercury 2.5 Preview each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 54 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.
Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.75/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $0.71/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.
This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Gemini 3.8 Flash and Mercury 2.5 Preview across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.