Cheaper alternatives to Inkling Small

Thinking Machines LMArena 1411.7 $0.637/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28

Everything cheaper and higher-scoring gives something up.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, 22 score at least as high as Inkling Small and cost no more under at least one workload. 22 do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Inkling Small, it is not generated.

Where it holds

Workload	Inkling Small $/M	With a trade
Balanced	$0.637	16
Summarise	$0.388	22
Chat	$0.645	14
Code gen	$0.872	13
Agentic	$0.354	15

Workload mixes are defined on the methodology page. Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

What you would be replacing

Intelligence	1411.7
Context window	1.0M
Max output	262K
Input modes	text, image, audio
Tool use	yes
Extended reasoning	yes

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Inkling Small.

Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 22

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

Model	Intelligence	$/M	Holds under	What you give up
MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi	1465 +53.3	$0.544	Balanced −15% Summarise −14% Chat −26% Code gen −24% Agentic −31%	262K → 131K max output no image, audio input
Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen	1456.2 +44.5	$0.560	Balanced −12% Summarise −24% Chat −3% Agentic −12%	1.0M → 1.0M context 262K → 131K max output no audio input
Gemma 4 31B Google	1441.7 +30	$0.152	Balanced −76% Summarise −77% Chat −72% Code gen −73% Agentic −71%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 16K max output no audio input
Hy3 Tencent	1441.2 +29.5	$0.144	Balanced −77% Summarise −80% Chat −75% Code gen −74% Agentic −77%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 128K max output no image, audio input
Gemma 4 26B A4B Google	1434.6 +22.9	$0.138	Balanced −78% Summarise −78% Chat −72% Code gen −73% Agentic −69%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 16K max output no audio input
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 DeepSeek	1431.6 +19.9	$0.101	Balanced −84% Summarise −83% Chat −85% Code gen −86% Agentic −85%	no image, audio input
MiniMax M3 MiniMax	1434.8 +23.1	$0.525	Balanced −18% Summarise −29% Chat −9% Code gen −6% Agentic −18%	no audio input
MiMo-V2.5 Xiaomi	1427.3 +15.6	$0.175	Balanced −73% Summarise −72% Chat −76% Code gen −76% Agentic −78%	262K → 131K max output
GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI	1428.5 +16.8	$0.450	Balanced −29% Summarise −49% Chat −15% Code gen −10% Agentic −31%	262K → 128K max output no audio input
DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek	1424.6 +12.9	$0.290	Balanced −55% Summarise −41% Chat −58% Code gen −63% Agentic −43%	1.0M → 164K context 262K → 147K max output no image, audio input
DeepSeek V3.2 Exp DeepSeek	1424.4 +12.7	$0.305	Balanced −52% Summarise −29% Chat −49% Code gen −59% Agentic −18%	1.0M → 164K context 262K → 66K max output no image, audio input
Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 Qwen	1419.3 tie	$0.205	Balanced −68% Summarise −71% Chat −58% Code gen −58% Agentic −55%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 16K max output no image, audio input no extended reasoning
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct Qwen	1418.6 tie	$0.350	Balanced −45% Summarise −64% Chat −24% Code gen −20% Agentic −34%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 236K max output no image, audio input no extended reasoning
DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus DeepSeek	1419.6 tie	$0.453	Balanced −29% Summarise −31% Chat −19% Code gen −20% Agentic −16%	1.0M → 164K context 262K → 33K max output no image, audio input
Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Qwen	1420.9 tie	$0.632	Balanced −1% Summarise −32%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 33K max output no audio input no extended reasoning
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview Google	1414.8 tie	$0.563	Balanced −12% Summarise −36% Agentic −14%	262K → 66K max output
Gemini 3.7 Flash Google	1490.2 +78.5	$0.354 summarise	Summarise −9%	262K → 66K max output
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite Google	1436.5 +24.8	$0.333 summarise	Summarise −14%	262K → 66K max output
GLM 4.7 Z.ai	1435.3 +23.6	$0.376 summarise	Summarise −3%	1.0M → 205K context 262K → 131K max output no image, audio input
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B Qwen	1417.9 tie	$0.351 summarise	Summarise −9%	1.0M → 262K context 262K → 236K max output no audio input
Gemini 2.5 Flash Google	1417.3 tie	$0.333 summarise	Summarise −14%	262K → 66K max output
Qwen3 235B A22B Thinking 2507 Qwen	1413.8 tie	$0.334 summarise	Summarise −14%	1.0M → 131K context 262K → 118K max output no image, audio input

What this compares, and what it leaves out

Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked tie rather than an improvement — see significance bands.
188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the value frontier, and every other model something cheaper beats is listed here.