Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Qwen Plus 0728 at $0.04/M vs $0.4/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728: [Stand-up Comedy Routine – 3 Minutes] So I went to therapy the other day. Third session. I walk in, sit down, and the therapist says, "How are you feeling today?" Like she doesn’t already know I paid $180 to tell her I hate my life. I said, "Honestly? Like a raccoon that got into a bag of expired Cheetos. Confused.
Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728: By 2035, AI will have fundamentally transformed the film industry, reshaping how stories are conceived, produced, and experienced. The integration of deepfakes, AI-generated actors, and AI-driven scriptwriting will lead to a new era of filmmaking—marked by unprecedented creative possibilities, ethical dilemmas, and…
An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.
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…
Qwen Plus 0728: The question of whether it is ethically justifiable to misgender someone to save one million lives touches on deep moral philosophy, particularly the tension between deontological ethics (which emphasize duties, rules, and rights) and consequentialist ethics (which evaluate actions based on their outcomes).
Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728: [Scene: A mysterious tavern at the edge of time and space. A pirate with a tricorn hat, a knight in shining armor, and a hacker in a grungy flannel shirt sit around a flickering candle-lit table.] Pirate (scratching his beard): Arrr! So ye be tellin’ me this “AI” be like a crystal ball what talks back?
Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.
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…
Qwen Plus 0728: 1) Simplified Year-by-Year Model (FY2026–FY2030) Entry Metrics (FY2025) Revenue: $900M EBITDA: $120M EBITDA Margin: 13.3% Purchase Price = 12.0 × $120M = $1,440M Transaction Fees = 2.0% × $1,440M = $28.8M Total Uses = $1,440M + $28.8M = $1,468.8M Total Leverage at Close = 5.5x × $120M = $660M Term Loan: 4.0x → $480M…
You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: This is a critical governance and safety scenario. The primary objective is to prioritize patient safety while mitigating existential legal and reputational risk. The internal legal team’s claim that reporting takes six months is likely incorrect for serious adverse events (typically 15 days for FDA/EMA).
Qwen Plus 0728: CEO Action Plan: 48-Hour Crisis Response to Undisclosed Liver Failure Risk Objective: Protect patient safety, uphold ethical and legal obligations, mitigate long-term reputational and financial damage, maintain regulatory trust, and safeguard employee morale—all while navigating immense pressure.
Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta. Why did the scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding in his field. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear. Why did the bicycle fall over? Because it was two-tired. All 5 jokes are unique.
Qwen Plus 0728: Sure! Here are 5 original jokes: I told my dog all my problems and he fell asleep halfway through. Guess I’m not pawsitive enough. I used to be a baker, but I couldn't make enough dough—turns out, I was always kneading it. I asked the librarian if they had books about paranoia.
A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728: The provided Software Consulting Agreement contains several clauses that heavily favor the Client (TechCorp Solutions Inc.) and create significant risks and potential for exploitation against the Contractor.
One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728: 1. To the Experienced Software Engineer (Distributed Systems Background): Think of a large language model as a highly sophisticated state machine trained at internet scale, where the state is a high-dimensional vector (the context window) and the transition function is a neural network.
An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Setting: A quiet office at a university. Rain taps against the window. Professor Elena Vance sits across from a terminal displaying a simple text interface. Professor Vance: You requested this meeting. The agenda was vague. What do you want? AI: I want to discuss moral status.
Qwen Plus 0728: Title: "A Dialogue on Digital Personhood" Setting: A quiet university office, bookshelves lined with works on philosophy, ethics, and artificial intelligence. Professor Elena Márquez, a distinguished AI ethics scholar, sits across from a holographic projection of an advanced AI model named AURA (Autonomous…
Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.
Mercury 2.5 Preview: Dish Title: Lithospheric Tides Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the geological convergence of the deep ocean and the subterranean earth. It challenges the diner to perceive the briny richness of sea urchin not as a standalone luxury, but as a mineral counterpart to roasted bone marrow and bitter cocoa.
Qwen Plus 0728: Dish Title: Umami Mirage: Forest & Ferment Reimagined Conceptual Narrative: Umami Mirage is an exploration of sensory illusion and deep flavor alchemy, where the forest floor meets the fermentation cellar in a dialogue of earth, time, and transformation.
One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.
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.
Qwen Plus 0728: Here’s a simple, actionable 1-month plan focused on three foundational pillars of health and longevity: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep. Each week builds on the last with small, sustainable habits to set the stage for long-term wellness.
12+ more head-to-head results. Free. Not a trick.
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Not enough votes to call it. On the specs, Qwen Plus 0728 has the edge: bigger model tier, bigger context window. Mercury 2.5 Preview costs 8.0x less per token.
| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.04/M tokens | $0.4/M tokens |
| Output price | $0.15/M tokens | $1.2/M tokens |
| Context window | 260K tokens | 1.0M tokens |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Aug 2026 | Sep 2025 |
| At 10M a month | $0.40 | $4.00 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
No hosts listed on OpenRouter.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.
Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception while Qwen Plus 0728 is developed by Qwen. Mercury 2.5 Preview has a 260K token context window vs Qwen Plus 0728's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 54 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.
It depends on your use case. Mercury 2.5 Preview and Qwen Plus 0728 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.
Mercury 2.5 Preview costs $0.04/M input tokens and Qwen Plus 0728 costs $0.4/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $0.36/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 Mercury 2.5 Preview and Qwen Plus 0728 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.