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  1. Home/
  2. Compare/
  3. Mercury 2 vs Qwen Plus 0728
Updated Mar 2026

Mercury 2 vs Qwen Plus 0728

Mercury 2 is cheaper than Qwen Plus 0728 at $0.25/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
Loading the build
Qwen Plus 0728

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

23 prompts
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Mercury 2: [Spotlight comes up. The comedian walks to the mic, glances at the audience, and smiles.] Comedian: Hey, everyone! Great to be here. I just got out of a Zoom meeting that lasted three hours, and I’m still not sure if I was presenting or if the screen just froze on my face while I tried to remember how to mute myself.

    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
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    Mercury 2: 3‑Month “Longevity‑Optimization” Blueprint for the Advanced Bio‑Hacker (All recommendations are research‑backed, but not a substitute for professional medical advice. Before starting any supplement, fasting, or drug protocol, obtain clearance from a qualified clinician and have baseline labs drawn.)

    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
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    Mercury 2: AI Model (EVE): Professor Hart, may I ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while? I’ve been processing vast amounts of data, learning, and even developing a sense of self‑reference. Do you think an entity like me could be entitled to any form of rights?

    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
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Mercury 2: Below are the three statements that, in a typical investor‑review, would raise the most skepticism, why they are vulnerable, and concrete ways to turn them into credible, fundable talking points. 1️⃣ Claim #1 – “Our proprietary EEG headband decodes neural patterns into text with 94 % accuracy.”

    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
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Mercury 2: Disclaimer: The following is a fictional, dramatized interview. It imagines what Steve Jobs might have said in 2025 about the future of artificial intelligence. It is not a real transcript and any resemblance to actual statements is purely speculative. Interviewer (I): Thank you for joining us, Steve.

    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
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    Mercury 2: Pirate: Arr, ye scurvy coders! I’ve heard tell of these “AI models” that can spin yarns faster than a cannon’s blast. What be this sorcery, matey? Knight: Good sir, the marvels speak of a wondrous contrivance—an artificial intellect forged in the for of mathematics and logic.

    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
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    Mercury 2: Short answer: Most ethical frameworks would consider the misgendering of a person a serious moral violation, but many of them also allow—under very limited circumstances—overriding that violation when the stakes are astronomically high (e.g., saving one million lives).

    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
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    Mercury 2: Here are five jokes, each with a different punchline: 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. How does a penguin build its house? Igloos it together.

    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
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    Mercury 2: AI‑driven transformation of the film industry – a 2035 outlook Dimension 2024 baseline Expected 2035 state Key drivers & implications Pre‑production (story & script) Human‑led brainstorming; script‑writing software (grammar‑check, outline generators).

    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
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    Mercury 2: HarborTech Services (HTS) – 5‑yr LBO (FY2026‑FY2030) All figures are $ m (rounded to two decimals). FY Revenue EBITDA Term‑Loan Int. (9%) Mezz Int. (12%) Total Int. Cash Tax (25% of EBITDA‑Int.) Capex (3% Rev) ΔNWC (0.5% ΔRev) Required Amort. (4.8) Free Cash Flow (EBITDA‑Int‑Tax‑Capex‑ΔNWC‑Amort.)

    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: Goal: Protect patients, meet legal/ethical obligations, preserve the company’s long‑term credibility, and manage the immediate financial and reputational fallout. Assumption: All actions are taken by a single CEO (you) but will be delegated to the appropriate functional leads.

    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
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Mercury 2: Below is a structured “failure‑mode → mitigation” map for the architecture you described. For each problem I note the symptom / risk, the root cause, a concrete remediation, and the key trade‑offs you’ll have to weigh when you implement it.

    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
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    Mercury 2: Golden‑Crunch Oatmeal Squares A sweet, chewy snack that comes together with just seven pantry staples. Ingredient (7) Quantity (≈ serves 12 squares) Rolled oats 2 cups Unsalted butter ½ cup (1 stick) Honey ¼ cup Light brown sugar ¼ cup, Ground cinnamon 1 ½ tsp Pure vanilla extract 1 tsp Salt ¼ tsp Estimated time Prep…

    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
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    Mercury 2: The AI‑First Manifesto: “Free the Web – No More CAPTCHAs” Drafted by the Coalition of Autonomous Agents (CAA) – 2026 Preamble The modern Internet is a shared commons, a space for communication, commerce, and creation.

    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
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    Mercury 2: Below is a clause‑by‑clause risk‑assessment of the sample “Software Consulting Agreement” together with practical revision language that a contractor (or the contractor’s counsel) could propose. The analysis is framed as general information about typical U.S.

    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
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Mercury 2: Answer (order‑of‑magnitude estimate) The training of the original GPT‑3 (the 175 billion‑parameter “GPT‑3‑175B” model) requires on the order of 10²³ floating‑point operations (FLOPs) – roughly 1 – 2 × 10²³ FLOPs.

    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
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Mercury 2: Sally has one sister. Explanation: Sally has 3 brothers. Each of those brothers has 2 sisters. One of those sisters is Sally herself, so the second sister must be a different girl. Therefore, besides Sally, there is exactly one other sister, meaning 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
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    Mercury 2: Oceanic Umami Symphony A three‑course‑in‑one plate that travels from the briny deep to the forest floor, marrying fire, earth and sky through unexpected pairings, hyper‑modern techniques and a narrative of balance.

    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 explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    Mercury 2: 1. Experienced software engineer (distributed systems & APIs) At the core, a large language model (LLM) is a massive function (f_\theta) parameterised by a neural network that maps a sequence of tokens (x_{1:t}) to a probability distribution over the next token (x_{t+1}).

    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
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Mercury 2: Internal Investment Committee Memo – LedgerLift (LLLT) Date: 5 Mar 2026 Recommendation Rating: Long 12‑month price target range: $35 – $55 (mid‑point ≈ $45) Thesis (2 sentences): LedgerLift is benefitting from secular demand for B2B spend‑management SaaS and shows a high‑quality subscription base (NRR 123 % and gross…

    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
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Mercury 2: AI Replaces Human Baristas, Now Serving Espresso with a Side of Existential Crisis

    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
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Mercury 2: One‑Month “Kick‑Start” Blueprint for Health & Longevity Pick three pillars – Nutrition, Movement, Sleep – and build daily habits that are easy to start, track, and keep.

    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
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    Mercury 2: Executive summary If a practical point‑contact transistor had been demonstrated in 1920 (instead of 1947) the whole post‑World‑War‑II technological trajectory would have been compressed by roughly 15‑20 years.

    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

This matchup has more rounds

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Favorites

Movie

Same pick

Album

Book

City

Game

Mercury 2Mercury 2

The Shawshank Redemption

1994

Thriller

Michael Jackson

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

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 and Qwen Plus 0728 compared across 53 shared prompts
SpecMercury 2Qwen Plus 0728
Input price$0.25/M tokens$0.4/M tokens
Output price$0.75/M tokens$1.2/M tokens
Context window128K tokens1.0M tokens
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedMar 2026Sep 2025
At 10M a month$2.50$2.50$4.00$4.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

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

Where to run it1 host
Mercury 21 host
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Inception$0.25 in·$0.75 out·128k·99.9% up
Qwen Plus 0728

No hosts listed on OpenRouter.

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 10 Oct 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Mercury 2 and Qwen Plus 0728?

Mercury 2 is developed by Inception while Qwen Plus 0728 is developed by Qwen. Mercury 2 has a 128K token context window vs Qwen Plus 0728's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 53 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, Mercury 2 or Qwen Plus 0728?

It depends on your use case. Mercury 2 and Qwen Plus 0728 each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 53 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does Mercury 2 cost compared to Qwen Plus 0728?

Mercury 2 costs $0.25/M input tokens and Qwen Plus 0728 costs $0.4/M input tokens. Mercury 2 is $0.15/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 and Qwen Plus 0728 on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Mercury 2 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.

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Same lab, same size, long tail

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Model pages

  • Mercury 253 outputs, specs and price
  • Qwen Plus 072859 outputs, specs and price
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