Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) Pricing
All plans and pricing as of 2026-07-18
Self-hosted (Free)
- ✓Full weights on Hugging Face -- original checkpoint plus an NVFP4 checkpoint for efficient inference on NVIDIA Blackwell
- ✓Open weights; license terms per the model card (not spelled out in the launch post)
- ✓Inkling-Small (276B total / 12B active) available in preview
Tinker (fine-tuning platform)
- ✓Inkling available on Tinker day one with 64K and 256K context options
- ✓Fine-tuning with cookbook support, incl. three recipes for Inkling's audio capabilities
- ✓This is the business model: Inkling is the starting point, Tinker is how Thinking Machines makes money
Hosted APIs (partners)
- ✓Served by TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks (day-zero partner), and Baseten
- ✓No first-party inference API from Thinking Machines itself
Is Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) Worth the Price?
Value Score: 8.5/10
Overall Score: 8.0/10 · Teams that want to fine-tune a serious multimodal open-weights model into a domain specialist -- Tinker plus the cookbook ecosystem makes Inkling the most customization-oriented large release of 2026. Also researchers who want audio-native reasoning in an open model.
Inkling is the most interesting kind of debut: a $12B lab's first model that deliberately refuses the benchmark arms race. The specs are real -- 975B/41B MoE, native text+image+audio input, 1M context, full weights on Hugging Face -- but the point is the Tinker fine-tuning flywheel: Inkling is sold as a starting ingredient, not a finished assistant. That makes it the leading US open-weights play (a lane Meta has drifted out of) and a genuinely different bet from Kimi K3's 'biggest model wins' approach launched the same week. If you consume models via API, this changes little today. If you build models from open weights, Inkling plus Tinker is now the most credible US-based path.
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How Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab) Pricing Compares
| Tool | Free Tier | Starting Price | Value Score | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inkling (Thinking Machines Lab)(this tool) | Yes | $0 | 8.5/10 | 8.0 |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.8 |
| MiniMax M3 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.4 |
| Gemma 4 (Google) | Yes | $0 | 10/10 | 8.3 |
| IBM Granite 4.0 | Yes | $0 | 9.5/10 | 8.2 |
| Kimi K3 (Moonshot) | Yes | $3 / $15/per 1M tokens (input/output) | 8.5/10 | 8.1 |