DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Thinking Machines: Inkling
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Thinking Machines: Inkling | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | deepseek | thinkingmachines |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.05/M | $1.00/M |
| Output Price | $0.57/M | $4.05/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 943,718 | 471,859 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | ✓ | - |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | - | ✓ |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.19 and Inkling costs $2.01, so DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is about 10.4 times cheaper for the same work.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling.
Only DeepSeek V4.1 Flash offers structured output; only Inkling offers audio input.
Across the 19 tasks where they differ, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores higher on 19 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Completion and others).
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash was released in September 2026 and Inkling in July 2026.
Pick DeepSeek V4.1 Flash if you need lower cost, long documents, structured output or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Inkling if you need audio input.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Thinking Machines: Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 125 |
| Code Review | 132 | 128 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 119 |
| Code Refactoring | 136 | 132 |
| Unit Test Generation | 124 | 116 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 131 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 119 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 120 | 116 |
| Frontend Component Design | 122 | 118 |
| Data Analysis | 124 | 120 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 121 |
| ETL Scripting | 128 | 124 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 111 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 116 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 131 | 123 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 131 | 123 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 137 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 115 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 121 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →