Inception sells new customers exactly one Mercury model — its own documentation still prices the three it closed

A footnote at the bottom of Inception's models page settles what the company is actually selling today: "Mercury 1, 2, and Mercury Edit 2 remain supported for existing customers." Access and migration, it adds, go through an Inception representative. For anyone opening an account this week, that leaves one buyable model — Mercury 2.5, announced on 8 September — plus two previews, Mercury Voice and Mercury Router, whose pricing is a request to contact sales. The interesting part is that the company's own developer documentation has not caught up with its marketing. The models reference page still carries Mercury 2 and Mercury Edit 2 in the same table as the flagship, with full rates ($0.25 per million input tokens, $0.75 output, $0.025 cached), their context windows (128K for chat, 32K on both code endpoints) and their endpoints. The FAQ on the same site answers a question about image input by naming all three models in the present tense. Nothing there tells a developer that two of them can no longer be bought. That matters for a catalogue like this one, because a live model card is not the same thing as a live product. Both models are running and billable — just not to new accounts. Neither has a published shutdown date, which is why our profiles keep them in production rather than marking them retired. The timeline is worth stating plainly. Mercury 2 was announced on 24 February 2026 as, in Inception's words, the world's fastest reasoning language model, at 1,009 tokens per second on NVIDIA Blackwell cards. Six and a half months later its successor arrived with 260K of context instead of 128K and a list price of $0.20 input — cut to $0.04 by a launch discount — against Mercury 2's unchanged $0.25. Mercury 2 was not undercut by a rival. It was undercut by the next model from the same company, and then quietly taken off the shelf. For a company whose entire pitch is speed, the product line moves at a similar pace. Buyers of a diffusion model should read that footnote as part of the price.