DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest vs Thinking Machines: Inkling Small
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ~deepseek | thinkingmachines |
| Quality Score | 99 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.04/M | $0.45/M |
| Output Price | $0.30/M | $1.20/M |
| Context Window | 1,048,576 | 524,288 |
| Max Output | 943,718 | 262,144 |
| 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 Flash Latest costs $0.12 and Inkling Small costs $0.75, so DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest is about 6.3 times cheaper for the same work.
DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest reads up to 1,048,576 tokens at once, roughly 1,573 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest offers structured output; only Inkling Small offers image input and audio input.
Across the 14 tasks where they differ, DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest scores higher on 10 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Inkling Small on 4 (Bug Fixing, Frontend Component Design, OCR / Document Parsing and others).
DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest was released in August 2026 and Inkling Small in July 2026.
Pick DeepSeek V4 Flash Latest if you need lower cost, long documents, structured output or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Inkling Small if you need image input or 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 Flash Latest | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 133 | 125 |
| Code Review | 131 | 128 |
| Code Refactoring | 135 | 132 |
| Bug Fixing | 135 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 123 | 116 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 119 | 116 |
| Frontend Component Design | 91 | 118 |
| Data Analysis | 123 | 120 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 133 | 121 |
| ETL Scripting | 127 | 124 |
| JSON Extraction | 131 | 119 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 129 | 125 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 85 | 123 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 85 | 123 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →