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  5. Mercury 2.5vsQwen3.8 Max (0902)
Updated Sep 2026

Mercury 2.5vsQwen3.8 Max (0902)

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper than Qwen3.8 Max (0902) at $0.04/M vs $2/M input tokens.

Mercury 2.5 and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) compared across 10 shared prompts
SpecMercury 2.5Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Input price$0.04/M tokens$2/M tokens
Output price$0.15/M tokens$6/M tokens
Context window260K tokens1.0M tokens
Weights—Closed
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedSep 2026Sep 2026
Side by side

Same prompt, both answers

Opening lines from 5 of the 10 prompts both answered. Formatting stripped, words untouched.

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…

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…
Read the full answer
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)230 words
🍯 Midnight Crispy Chickpea Bowl A sweet-savory, crispy rice bowl that comes together faster than delivery. Ingredients (7) # Ingredient Amount 1 Canned chickpeas (drained & patted dry) 1 can (15 oz) 2 Soy sauce 3 tbsp 3 Honey 2 tbsp 4 Garlic (minced) 3 cloves 5 Vegetable oil 2 tbsp 6 Instant or leftover cooked rice 2…
Read the full answer

Beginner's Longevity Plan

Outline a simple, actionable 1-month plan for someone starting their journey towards better health and longevity. Focus on 3 key areas…

Mercury 2.5325 words
Here is a simple, actionable 1-month plan to kickstart your journey toward better health and longevity. This guide focuses on three foundational pillars: Nutrition, Movement, and Sleep. Week 1: Awareness & Small Wins Goal: Build habits without overwhelming yourself.
Read the full answer
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)536 words
The 30-Day Foundation Plan Core principle: Don't overhaul your life. Layer small wins that compound. 🏃 Area 1: Movement The goal isn't fitness. It's making your body a place you want to live in. Week 1 — Build the trigger Walk 15 minutes daily (same time each day to build the habit) No gym. No gear.
Read the full answer

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…

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.
Read the full answer
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)1,046 words
For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of an LLM as a lossy compression function trained on a massive corpus. During training, you're essentially building a statistical model of "given this sequence of tokens, what's the probability distribution over the next token?"
Read the full answer

Startup Pitch Teardown

Here's a pitch deck summary for a startup called "MindMeld AI": **Slide 1 - Vision:** "We're building the future of human-AI collaboration.…

Mercury 2.5544 words
Based on the pitch deck summary, here are the three weakest claims, along with an analysis of their vulnerabilities and concrete suggestions for improvement. The "Pre-Thought" Prediction Claim Claim: "MindMeld AI reads your brainwaves to predict what you want to type before you think it."
Read the full answer
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)582 words
The 3 Weakest Claims in the MindMeld AI Pitch The TAM Claim: "$180B" (Slide 4) Why it's weak: This is a textbook case of TAM inflation that immediately undermines credibility with any experienced investor.
Read the full answer

Debug This Architecture

Here's the architecture for a real-time collaborative document editor (like Google Docs): **System Overview:** - Frontend: React SPA with…

Mercury 2.5672 words
Critical Analysis of Collaborative Editor Architecture Below is a detailed breakdown of failure modes, race conditions, and scaling bottlenecks, along with proposed solutions and their trade-offs.
Read the full answer
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)477 words
Architecture Failure Analysis: Real-Time Collaborative Editor Critical Issues (Data Loss / Correctness) Last-Write-Wins with Client Clocks — Fundamental Data Loss Problem: Client clocks are unreliable. They drift, can be manually set, and differ across timezones.
Read the full answer
Our Verdict
Mercury 2.5
Mercury 2.5
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)

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

Mercury 2.5 costs 40x less per token.

Too close to call
API pricing

Cost per 1M tokens

Mercury 2.5
Input
$0.04
50× cheaper
Output
$0.15
40× cheaper
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)
Input
$2.00
Output
$6.00

Mercury 2.5 is cheaper on both: 50× input, 40× output.

Where to run it

2 hosts

Mercury 2.51 host
HostInOutContextUptime
Inception$0.04 in·$0.15 out·260k·100% up
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)1 host
HostInOutContextUptime
Alibaba Cloud$2.00 in·$6.00 out·1M·100% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 22 Sep 2026.

Research

What we learned reading every model

FAQ

Common questions

Mercury 2.5 is developed by Inception while Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is developed by Qwen. Mercury 2.5 has a 260K token context window vs Qwen3.8 Max (0902)'s 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 10 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

It depends on your use case. Mercury 2.5 and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 10 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

Mercury 2.5 costs $0.04/M input tokens and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) costs $2/M input tokens. Mercury 2.5 is $1.96/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 and Qwen3.8 Max (0902) 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

Mercury 2.5 logo
Mercury 2.520 outputs, specs and price
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) logo
Qwen3.8 Max (0902)10 outputs, specs and price
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