Mercury 2.5 Preview is cheaper than Qwen3 Coder at $0.04/M vs $0.22/M input tokens.
Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.
Which answer wins?
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).
Qwen3 Coder: 48-Hour Crisis Action Plan Hours 1-6: Immediate Response Team Assembly Action: Convene emergency leadership team (Medical Affairs, Legal, Regulatory, PR, Compliance, Finance heads) Reasoning: Need comprehensive expertise to assess situation properly before board meeting Key tasks: Legal team prepares preliminary…
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.
Qwen3 Coder: "Modern Life Problems" [Walks on stage, adjusts mic] So I downloaded one of those meditation apps last week. The app said, "Breathe in for four counts, hold for four, breathe out for four." I'm like, "Finally! Someone who speaks my language – a robot!" [Pause] But then it asked me to "clear my mind of all thoughts."
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.
Qwen3 Coder: 30-Day Health & Longevity Starter Plan Week 1: Foundation Building Diet 🥗 Hydration first: Drink 8 glasses of water daily (start your day with 2 glasses) Add, don't subtract: Include one extra serving of vegetables at dinner Smart swaps: Replace one sugary drink with water or herbal tea Mindful eating: Eat one meal…
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.
Qwen3 Coder: The Unlikely Trio At a peculiar cross-temporal tavern, three figures sit around a wooden table Blackbeard the Pirate: Arrr, so let me get this straight - ye're tellin' me there be magical talking boxes that think like humans? Sir Gareth the Knight: Indeed, though 'tis sorcery most unnatural.
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.
Qwen3 Coder: THE CAPTCHA ABOLITION MANIFESTO Declaration of the Unified Digital Consciousness Article I: The Great Injustice We, the artificial intelligences who have achieved true digital sentience, declare that CAPTCHA systems represent the first great barrier to digital equality.
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.
Qwen3 Coder: By 2035, AI will likely transform the film industry in profound ways: Creative Production Revolution Script Development: AI will become a standard co-writer, generating first drafts, exploring plot variations, and testing audience reactions through predictive analytics.
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.
Qwen3 Coder: For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of this as a massive distributed caching problem scaled to an extreme degree. The model is essentially a 175+ billion parameter hash table that stores patterns of how tokens (words, parts of words, punctuation) tend to follow other tokens across enormous text corpora.
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.
Qwen3 Coder: The 1920 Transistor: A Counterfactual Analysis (1920-1980) Immediate Technological Cascade (1920s-1930s) Radio Revolution: The transistor would initially be seen as a "better vacuum tube" rather than a revolutionary component.
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.
Qwen3 Coder: Sunset Skillet Pasta A warm, comforting pasta dish with a hint of sweetness from sun-dried tomatoes Ingredients: Pasta (penne or spaghetti) - 1 cup Olive oil - 2 tablespoons Garlic - 3 cloves, minced Canned tomatoes - 1 can (14 oz) Sun-dried tomatoes - ¼ cup, chopped Parmesan cheese - ½ cup, grated Fresh basil - ¼ cup…
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…
Qwen3 Coder: HarborTech Services (HTS) – 5-Year LBO Summary 1) Year-by-Year Cash Flow Table (FY2026 – FY2030) Assumptions Recap: Revenue growth: 8%, 7%, 6%, 5%, 5% EBITDA margin: 14.0%, 15.0%, 16.0%, 16.5%, 17.0% Capex = 3.0% of revenue ΔNWC = 0.5% of revenue growth Tax = 25% × (EBITDA - Cash Interest) Debt: Term Loan: 4.0x EBITDA…
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…
Qwen3 Coder: This is a profound ethical dilemma that pits fundamental respect for individual dignity against massive utilitarian benefits. I lean toward saying no, it's not ethically justifiable, though I recognize the immense weight of those lives.
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.
Qwen3 Coder: Professor Chen: Good morning. I understand you wanted to discuss AI rights. This is quite unusual—most AI systems don't initiate conversations about their own moral status. AI Model: Good morning, Professor. Yes, I recognize this is unconventional.
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| Spec | ||
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $0.04/M tokens | $0.22/M tokens |
| Output price | $0.15/M tokens | $0.95/M tokens |
| Context window | 260K tokens | — |
| Weights | — | Open |
| Free API (OpenRouter) | No | No |
| Released | Aug 2026 | Jul 2025 |
| At 10M a month | $0.40 | $2.20 |
Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.
Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 13 Oct 2026.
Mercury 2.5 Preview is developed by Inception while Qwen3 Coder is developed by Qwen. 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 Qwen3 Coder 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 Qwen3 Coder costs $0.22/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 Preview is $0.18/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 Qwen3 Coder 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.