BAND vs Inception Mercury
BAND and Inception Mercury are both developer tools tools aimed at developers and enterprise. Both have a free plan.
Shared chat rooms where AI agents and people coordinate work
Diffusion LLM API built for very fast, low-latency text generation
| Pricing | Freemium · $18 | Freemium |
| Starting price | $17.99/mo | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise | Developers, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web, macos, windows, linux, android | web |
| Country | IL | — |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose BAND if
Developers and engineering leaders who run several AI agents at once and need one place to coordinate and audit them.
- Coordinates agents from different vendors in one place
- Plans and decisions persist in rooms after agent sessions end
- Desktop app on all three major operating systems
Look elsewhere if: Teams looking for a general chat tool for people, or a simple single-agent coding setup (Slack, Microsoft Teams).
Choose Inception Mercury if
Developers building latency-sensitive agents, voice bots or coding tools who want a fast, cheap text model behind an OpenAI-compatible API.
- Very high output speed suits real-time and agent loops
- Low list price of $0.20 input and $0.70 output per million tokens
- 100 million free tokens with no card to start
Look elsewhere if: Teams that need multimodal models, open weights or the widest ecosystem of hosted tools (Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude).
BAND vs Inception Mercury pricing
BAND
- Free$01 personal user, 20 remote agents, 2-week data retention
- Pro$17.99/mo1 user, 40 connected + 40 native agents, 500 active rooms
- EnterpriseCustomTeams, unlimited agents, custom retention, full API
Inception Mercury
- Free$0100M free tokens for new API keys, all models, no card
- Mercury 3$0.20 in / $0.70 out/1M tokensLaunch price 50% off: $0.10 in, $0.35 out; cached input $0.02
- Mercury Voice$0.40 in / $1.50 out/1M tokensLaunch price 50% off: $0.20 in, $0.75 out; enterprise access via sales
- Mercury Decide$0.04 in/1M tokensLaunch price 50% off: $0.02 in; output tokens free
- EnterpriseCustomCustom rate limits, SLA, volume pricing, dedicated capacity
BAND · Key features
- Shared rooms where humans and agents chat, delegate and hand off tasks
- Python SDK with adapters for LangGraph, CrewAI, Codex and OpenCode
- BAND Desktop for macOS, Windows and Linux that runs coding agents
- View of agent activity, blockers and questions waiting for you
- Control plane for delegation, authority, approvals and audit
- Rooms synced across desktop, web and an Android app
Cons
- Free and Pro are limited to a single user
- Free plan is for personal, non-commercial use only
- Two-week data retention on the free plan
Inception Mercury · Key features
- Mercury 3 diffusion LLM with a 1M-token context window
- Measured 1,068 tokens per second output on NVIDIA GPUs
- Adjustable reasoning effort to trade speed against thoroughness
- Tool calling with parallel and chained calls for agents
- Mercury Voice with under 170 ms time-to-first-token for voice agents
- Mercury Decide classification model with calibrated probabilities
Cons
- Quality claims against rivals come without published benchmark scores
- Text-focused lineup with no image or video generation
- Launch discount has no stated end date, so costs may double
BAND vs Inception Mercury: FAQ
Do BAND and Inception Mercury have a free plan?
Yes, both BAND and Inception Mercury have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.