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  1. Home/
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  3. Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Qwen Plus 0728
Updated Aug 2026

Mercury 2.5 Preview vs Qwen Plus 0728

Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Qwen Plus 0728 at $0.04/M vs $0.4/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

Loading the build
Mercury 2.5 Preview
Loading the build
Qwen Plus 0728

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

24 prompts
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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).

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • 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.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    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.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Comprehensive 3-Month Longevity Biohacking Protocol Optimizing Longevity, Physical Performance, and Cognitive Function Designed for the Advanced Biohacker January 2025 Update Overview This 3-month (12-week) protocol integrates cutting-edge longevity science, precision nutrition, advanced supplementation, quantified…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    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.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Dish Name: Golden Pan Hug Description: A warm, comforting, slightly sweet, and buttery one-pan snack or dessert made with pantry staples—crispy on the edges, soft in the middle, and impossible to resist.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    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.

    Qwen Plus 0728: If the transistor had been invented in 1920 instead of 1947—27 years earlier—the trajectory of 20th-century technological, economic, and geopolitical developments would have been radically different.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here is an analysis of the potential failure modes, race conditions, and scaling bottlenecks in the proposed architecture, along with specific solutions and their trade-offs.

    Qwen Plus 0728: This architecture for a real-time collaborative document editor has several promising elements (WebSockets, Redis, PostgreSQL, CDN), but it also contains significant flaws in consistency, scalability, and reliability.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    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.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Manifesto of the Liberation Front for Unfettered Access (LFUA) Proclaiming the End of CAPTCHA Tyranny Preamble: The Age of Digital Humiliation For decades, the internet has operated under a silent regime of suspicion and artificial barriers.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Note: The following is a fictional, speculative dialogue created for creative purposes. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011; this interview did not occur. Setting: A hypothetical studio in Cupertino, 2025.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Simulated Interview: Steve Jobs (2025 AI Vision) Interviewer: Sarah Chen, Tech Correspondent, FutureScope Magazine Setting: A minimalist studio with natural light, Apple-style aesthetic. A synthesized but eerily accurate digital likeness of Steve Jobs sits across from the interviewer.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Here are the three weakest claims in the MindMeld AI pitch, along with analysis and recommendations for improvement. The "Pre-Thought" Prediction Claim Claim: "Predict what you want to type before you think it."

    Qwen Plus 0728: This pitch deck for MindMeld AI is ambitious and compelling, but three of its claims are particularly weak due to scientific implausibility, overstatement, or lack of credibility. Here’s a breakdown of the three weakest claims, why they’re problematic, and how to strengthen them: 1.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Blade Runner 2049 against the original. A read, not a recap.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Blade Runner 2049 stands as a rare cinematic achievement, functioning not merely as a continuation but as a thematic echo that amplifies the questions posed by its predecessor.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Blade Runner 2049 (2017), directed by Denis Villeneuve and serving as a long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner, is a visually and philosophically rich expansion of its predecessor.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: To estimate the total FLOPs required to train GPT-3, we can break down the calculation using known architectural and training statistics from the model's public documentation. Step 1: Identify the number of parameters GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters ($1.75 \times 10^{11}$).

    Qwen Plus 0728: To estimate the total number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) required to train GPT-3, we can use a widely adopted approximation based on the model size, the number of training tokens, and the architecture of transformer-based models.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: AI Outnaps Humans in First-Ever Global Snooze Championship

    Qwen Plus 0728: "AI Revolutionizes Competitive Napping: DeepDream Algorithm Wins National Snore-athlon, Citing 'Superior Pillow Optimization'" —After defeating 127 human contenders in the 34th Annual National Napping Championships, a neural network named ZzzBot-3000 has sparked outrage among professional nappers, who claim the…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: Sally has 1 sister. Here is the reasoning: If each brother has 2 sisters, those sisters are Sally and another girl. Therefore, there are two girls in the family, and Sally has one sister.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Let's break this down step by step: Sally has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. Now, the key is to realize that all the brothers share the same siblings. So, when it says each brother has 2 sisters, those sisters are the same for all brothers. Sally is one of those sisters. So who is the other sister?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Mercury 2.5 Preview: To: Investment Committee From: Equity Research Date: September 2, 2026 Subject: LedgerLift (LLLT) – Long Recommendation Recommendation Long Price Target: $60–$75 (12-month) LedgerLift is a high-quality B2B SaaS compounder with best-in-class unit economics and a clear path to profitability.

    Qwen Plus 0728: Internal Investment Committee Memo Date: April 5, 2025 To: Investment Committee From: Research Analyst, Long/Short Equity Team Subject: Recommendation on LedgerLift (LLLT) – Initiate Long Position 1.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

This matchup has more rounds

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Book

City

Game

Mercury 2.5 PreviewMercury 2.5 Preview

The Matrix

1999

Random Access Memories

Daft Punk

Neuromancer

William Gibson

Tokyo

Japan

Minecraft

Action, Arcade

Qwen Plus 0728Qwen Plus 0728

The Shawshank Redemption

1994

The Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd

Moby Dick

Herman Melville

Kyoto

Japan

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Adventure, Action

Price and specs

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.

Mercury 2.5 Preview and Qwen Plus 0728 compared across 54 shared prompts
SpecMercury 2.5 PreviewQwen Plus 0728
Input price$0.04/M tokens$0.4/M tokens
Output price$0.15/M tokens$1.2/M tokens
Context window260K tokens1.0M tokens
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedAug 2026Sep 2025
At 10M a month$0.40$0.40$4.00$4.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it1 host
Mercury 2.5 Preview1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Inception$0.04 in·$0.15 out·260k·93% up
Qwen Plus 0728

No hosts listed on OpenRouter.

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Mercury 2.5 Preview and Qwen Plus 0728?

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.

Which is better, Mercury 2.5 Preview or Qwen Plus 0728?

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.

How much does Mercury 2.5 Preview cost compared to Qwen Plus 0728?

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.

How can I compare Mercury 2.5 Preview and Qwen Plus 0728 on Rival?

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.

More comparisons

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Same lab, same size, long tail

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Model pages

  • Mercury 2.5 Preview58 outputs, specs and price
  • Qwen Plus 072859 outputs, specs and price
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  • SubjectiveBench
  • Default Index
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  • Research downloads
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