---
title: "Thinking Machines: Inkling Small — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/models/thinkingmachines__inkling-small/
description: "Thinking Machines: Inkling Small: $0.450/M in, $1.20/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper."
---

# Thinking Machines: Inkling Small — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai

> Thinking Machines: Inkling Small: $0.450/M in, $1.20/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper.

[Leaderboard](/) / Thinking Machines

# Inkling Small

Thinking Machines · released 2026-07-30

 $0.637 per million tokens, balanced Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic

## DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 scores higher and costs less — but you would give something up.

**+10.6** on the capability index and **84% cheaper** ($0.105/M against $0.637/M). What you lose:

 - no image, audio input

Capability scores do not measure context length, output ceiling or which inputs a model accepts, so a higher score does not mean a drop-in replacement.

The same model via **free** is 100% cheaper (free/M) — same weights, different latency.

### Every price dimension

| Input | $0.450 /M |
| --- | --- |
| Output | $1.20 /M |
| Cached input | $0.100 /M |

### Independent scores

| Intelligence | 41.2 |
| --- | --- |
| Coding | 52.9 |
| Agentic | 31.9 |
| LMArena Elo | 1411.7 default |

Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.

### Capability

| Context window | 1.0M |
| --- | --- |
| Max output | 262K |
| Input modes | text, image, audio |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |

### Provenance

| Price source | openrouter.ai |
| --- | --- |
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |

Inkling Small is an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model from Thinking Machines Lab, with 12B active parameters out of 276B total. It is positioned as the smaller, more efficient member of...