Inkling API Pricing & Cost Calculator
Inkling is the wild-card workhorse for buyers wanting an alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the Chinese labs. Pricing is competitive for high-volume document work with a real 1M context.
Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's flagship model and their first broadly available API release. It positions at workhorse pricing alongside GPT-5.6 Terra, with a 1-million-token context for agentic workloads.
By TechCompare · Updated
Calculator
Cost Comparison
Based on 50,000 input tokens (50% cached), 3,000 output tokens, and 500 requests.
How this is calculated
Inkling is priced at $1.00 per million input tokens and $4.05 per million output tokens, with an 83% prompt caching discount ($0.17 per million cached reads). That is half of GPT-5.6 Terra's input list rate ($2.00) while sitting just below GLM-5.2 ($4.40) and well below Terra on output.
Verdict
Inkling is the wild-card workhorse for buyers wanting an alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the Chinese labs. Pricing is competitive for high-volume document work with a real 1M context.
More API Standalones scenarios
Frequently asked questions
Who is Thinking Machines Lab and why is Inkling notable?
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