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Inception Labs (Mercury) free tier

🎁 Trials (no card when possible) · no card · live — last verified by a probe on 2026-11-01 · platform.inceptionlabs.ai · back to the whole list

What you get

A one-time signup token balance on Mercury diffusion models, including the current Mercury 3 chat model and earlier chat and code-edit models

Free models

The free offer is a budget for model usage across the catalog. See Limits for its conditions and Connect for API details, where available.

Limits, in the vendor’s words

100,000,000 tokens once; 1,000 requests/minute; 1,000,000 input tokens/minute; 100,000 output tokens/minute per account

No payment details are required. The signup token balance is shared across all models, does not refill and is spent alongside the Free tier’s per-minute traffic limits. After it, usage is pay-as-you-go at the model’s current token prices; a launch discount is not a separate free model.

Where it is offered

The vendor names no country it keeps the offer from (source, read 2026-09-26).

What happens to what you send

What you send may be used to train or improve models unless you turn that off. In the vendor’s words: “we may use User Submissions to … train our models. If you do not want us to use your User Submissions to train our models, you can opt-out by setting the ‘Improve the model for everyone’ option under User Settings in the API Platform to OFF.” (source).

Connect

Base URL: https://api.inceptionlabs.ai/v1
Key: INCEPTION_LABS_API_KEY — get one at https://platform.inceptionlabs.ai
Callable ids: mercury-3
Note: Mercury 3 supports Chat Completions. Check the authenticated catalog for older Mercury revisions. Mercury Edit 2 uses separate FIM/edit endpoints; Mercury Voice requires enterprise enablement and Mercury Decide uses a decisions endpoint. The signup token balance is shared across models.

Try it from your terminal with your key in INCEPTION_LABS_API_KEY — it goes from your machine to the vendor and nowhere else:

curl -s https://api.inceptionlabs.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $INCEPTION_LABS_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"mercury-3","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"2+2? MAKE NO MISTAKES."}]}'

Evidence

Probe: the page at https://docs.inceptionlabs.ai/get-started, anchored on 100 million free tokens, no payment details required; ids checked in https://api.inceptionlabs.ai/v1/models
Source: https://docs.inceptionlabs.ai/get-started
Source: https://docs.inceptionlabs.ai/resources/faq
Source: https://docs.inceptionlabs.ai/get-started/models
Source: https://docs.inceptionlabs.ai/get-started/rate-limits

History

Each line is a change to what this page publishes, dated the day it reached the list, in UTC.

2026-09-25 — Free models changed: dropped mercury-2, mercury-2.5, mercury-edit-2
2026-09-10 — Free models changed: added mercury-2.5
2026-08-14 — Added: A signup grant on the Mercury diffusion models, one for chat and one built for fill-in-the-middle and code edits — the second is the reason this row is here, since an FIM endpoint is what an IDE completion plugin actually calls

Generated from registry.yaml on 2026-11-01 and re-verified twice a week; the full list, the Atom feed and the machinery are at https://github.com/mvalentsev/awesome-free-ai-coding.

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