Is Inkling Small a good deal?

Whether anything in this catalogue beats Inkling Small on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.

12 undominated of 145 · Oct 6, 2026

As of Oct 6, 2026, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores higher and costs less than Inkling Small for Balanced on LMArena, but it is not a drop-in. You would give up: max output.

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Current model

Inkling Small

Balanced

3 tokens in per 1 out

MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 77.3 points higher and costs 15% less, but you would give up: max output.

Inkling Small

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1413.7

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$0.638/M

MiMo-V2.6-Pro

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1491.0

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$0.540/M

Inkling Small takes text, image, audio, returns up to 262,144 tokens from a 524,288-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.

Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: nothing dominates it outright, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Inkling Small scores 1413.7 at $0.638 per million tokens for this mix.

Higher score, lower price, named losses

Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.

ModelLMArenaEffective $/MYou give up
MiMo-V2.6-Pro1491.0$0.540/Mmax output
GLM 5.3 Flash1469.6$0.238/Maudio
MiMo-V2.5-Pro1465.0$0.544/Mmax output, image, audio
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash1462.5$0.182/Maudio
MiMo-V2.6-Flash1456.4$0.175/Mmax output
Inkling Small1413.7 · $0.638/MLMArena EloEffective $/M · Balanced
145 rated, priced standard models. Chartreuse is the frontier. Cobalt is the model you named, when it is not on the staircase.

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