Sakana: Fugu Max vs Thinking Machines: Inkling

For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling costs $2.01 and Fugu Max costs $3.50, so Inkling is about 1.7 times cheaper for the same work.

Fugu Max reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling.

Only Fugu Max offers structured output; only Inkling offers audio input.

Across the 19 tasks where they differ, Fugu Max scores higher on 13 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others), Inkling on 6 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others).

Fugu Max was released in September 2026 and Inkling in July 2026.

Pick Fugu Max if you need long documents, structured output or the stronger all-round task scores; pick Inkling if you need lower cost 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.