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  5. Kimi K2 0905vsMercury 2.5
Updated Sep 2026

Kimi K2 0905vsMercury 2.5

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper than Kimi K2 0905 at $0.04/M vs $0.6/M input tokens.

Kimi K2 0905 and Mercury 2.5 compared across 20 shared prompts
SpecKimi K2 0905Mercury 2.5
Input price$0.6/M tokens$0.04/M tokens
Output price$2.5/M tokens$0.15/M tokens
Context window262K tokens260K tokens
WeightsOpen—
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedSep 2025Sep 2026
Side by side

Same prompt, both answers

Opening lines from 6 of the 20 prompts both answered. Formatting stripped, words untouched.

Mini LBO Underwrite

You are underwriting a 5-year LBO for a private equity investment committee. Company (fictional): HarborTech Services (HTS) –…

Kimi K2 0905281 words
HarborTech Services – 5-yr LBO model (all $ in millions) Operating & cash-flow build (FY26-30) FY25 FY26 FY27 FY28 FY29 FY30 Revenue 900 972 1,040 1,102 1,157 1,215 EBITDA 120 136 156 176 191 207 Term int (9%) 43.2 36.6 29.4 21.6 13.2 Mezz int (12%) 21.6 22.0 22.5 23.0 23.5 Tax shield @25% 17.8 24.4 31.0 36.6 42.5…
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Mercury 2.5403 words
1. Simplified Year-by-Year LBO Model (FY2026–FY2030) Entry Assumptions: Enterprise Value (EV): $120m × 12.0x = $1,440m Transaction Fees: $1,440m × 2.0% = $28.8m Total Debt at Close: $120m × 5.5x = $660m Term Loan: $120m × 4.0x = $480m Mezzanine: $120m × 1.5x = $180m Equity Required: $1,440m (EV) + $28.8m (Fees) − $660m…
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Simple 7-Ingredient Recipe

Create a simple recipe for a delicious dish (sweet or savory) using only 7 common pantry ingredients. Include a creative name for the dish…

Kimi K2 0905192 words
Dish Name: “Midnight Magic Peanut-Butter Clouds” Pantry 7: Peanut butter – ½ cup Granulated sugar – ½ cup 1 large egg Vanilla extract – ½ tsp Baking soda – ¼ tsp Salt – 1 pinch Cocoa powder – 1 Tbsp (or 1 extra tsp sugar if you don’t want chocolate) Time: 5 min prep + 8 min bake = 13 minutes total Yield: 8–10 bite-size…
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Mercury 2.5190 words
Pantry Pasta Primavera Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes Servings: 2 Ingredients (7 Common Pantry Items) Pasta (spaghetti, penne, or fusilli) – 8 oz Canned crushed tomatoes – 1 can (14 oz) Olive oil – 3 tablespoons Garlic powder – 1 teaspoon Dried oregano – 1 teaspoon Parmesan cheese (grated) – ½ cup Salt and…
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Explain Like I'm a Specific Expert

Explain how a large language model (like GPT or Claude) learns and generates text to each of these three audiences: 1. **An experienced…

Kimi K2 0905884 words
Senior backend engineer Think of the model as a 200-layer, purely functional, eventually-consistent key/value store whose keys are every token prefix it has ever seen and whose values are probability vectors over the next token. At “compile time” (pre-training) it sees ~10²¹ bytes of text.
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Mercury 2.5572 words
For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of the model as a stateless microservice that has ingested the entire public internet as its training dataset. During the training phase, it performs a massive distributed optimization job, adjusting internal weights to minimize a loss function based on next-token prediction.
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Michelin Star Recipe Design

Design an innovative recipe for a multi-component dish worthy of a Michelin 3-star restaurant. The recipe should feature an unusual…

Kimi K2 09051,124 words
Dish “Mid-Winter Aurora” A transient bite of the polar night: spruce-ash cured scallop, sea-urchin & white-chocolate snow, black-garlic parsnip “soil”, pickled pine-bud glass, spruce-wood smoke encapsulated in a hot caramel sphere that melts tableside to release the aroma of a burning yule log while the sauce—fermented…
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Mercury 2.5827 words
Dish Title: Chronos and Mycelium Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the intersection of time, decay, and rebirth. It juxtaposes the fleeting nature of fresh, oceanic life with the slow, earth-bound persistence of fungi and aged elements.
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Advanced Investment Memo (IC Memo)

You are writing an internal investment committee memo for a long/short equity fund. Company (fictional): LedgerLift (ticker: LLLT) – B2B…

Kimi K2 0905634 words
INTERNAL INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEMO Date: 12 June 20XX Security: LedgerLift Inc. (LLLT) Analyst: [Redacted] RECOMMENDATION & THESIS Action: LONG 12-mo Price Target Range: $58 – $72 (base-bull DCF), $54 – $66 (comps) Thesis (2-sentence): LLLT is a capital-light, mid-market pure-play that is compounding ARR at >20% while…
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Mercury 2.5735 words
To: Investment Committee From: Equity Research Date: September 22, 2026 Subject: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Initiation of Coverage Recommendation & Thesis Recommendation: Long 12-Month Price Target: $55 – $68 Thesis: LedgerLift offers a rare combination of high-quality SaaS unit economics (NRR 123%, CAC payback 18mo) and…
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Historical Counterfactual Analysis

If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947, trace the likely technological, economic, and geopolitical implications through…

Kimi K2 0905849 words
This is a fascinating counterfactual. If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947, the technological, economic, and geopolitical landscape of the 20th century would have been dramatically altered. Let's trace the implications through 1980, focusing on second- and third-order effects. 1.
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Mercury 2.5660 words
Inventing the transistor in 1920 would have fundamentally reshaped the 20th century, compressing the digital age by roughly two decades. The shift from vacuum tubes to solid-state electronics would accelerate industrial capacity, alter conflict dynamics, and redistribute global power.
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Our Verdict
Kimi K2 0905
Kimi K2 0905
Mercury 2.5
Mercury 2.5

Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, nothing separates them.

Mercury 2.5 costs 17x less per token.

Too close to call

Reviewing agent-written code?See a Brief PR report

API pricing

Cost per 1M tokens

Kimi K2 0905
Input
$0.60
Output
$2.50
Mercury 2.5
Input
$0.04
15× cheaper
Output
$0.15
17× cheaper

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on both: 15× input, 17× output.

Where to run it

2 hosts

Kimi K2 09051 host
HostInOutContextUptime
NNovitafp8$0.60 in·$2.50 out·262k·100% up
Mercury 2.51 host
HostInOutContextUptime
Inception$0.04 in·$0.15 out·260k·100% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 23 Sep 2026.

Research

What we learned reading every model

FAQ

Common questions

Kimi K2 0905 is developed by Moonshot AI while Mercury 2.5 is developed by Inception. Kimi K2 0905 has a 262K token context window vs Mercury 2.5's 260K. You can compare their actual outputs across 20 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

It depends on your use case. Kimi K2 0905 and Mercury 2.5 each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 20 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

Kimi K2 0905 costs $0.6/M input tokens and Mercury 2.5 costs $0.04/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 is $0.56/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 Kimi K2 0905 and Mercury 2.5 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.

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Model pages

Kimi K2 0905 logo
Kimi K2 090559 outputs, specs and price
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Mercury 2.520 outputs, specs and price
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