As of August 20, 2026, Inkling-Small and MiniMax M3 have the same blended API cost at $1.50 per 1 million input plus 1 million output tokens. Inkling-Small is $0.30 / $1.20 per million tokens versus MiniMax M3 at $0.30 / $1.20. Sources: https://thinkingmachines.ai and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing
Sources: Thinking Machines Lab pricing (https://thinkingmachines.ai); AnotherWrapper LLM pricing (https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing)
Inkling-Small
Thinking Machines
Input
$0.30
Output
$1.20
MiniMax M3
MiniMax
Input
$0.30
Output
$1.20
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Inkling-SmallMiniMax M3Verdict
Inkling-Small offers significantly lower pricing, while MiniMax M3 leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 20, 2026, Inkling-Small is 0% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Inkling-Small costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens ($1.50 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). MiniMax M3 costs $0.30 / $1.20 per million tokens ($1.50 blended). Sources: https://thinkingmachines.ai and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Inkling-Small Thinking Machines Lab API pricing is $0.30 input and $1.20 output per million tokens via Thinking Machines Lab. MiniMax M3 MiniMax API pricing is $0.30 input and $1.20 output per million tokens via MiniMax. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
MiniMax M3 leads on SWE-bench Verified: Inkling-Small at 80.2% vs MiniMax M3 at 80.5%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
Inkling-Small supports a 256K token context window, while MiniMax M3 supports 1M tokens. MiniMax M3 offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
MiniMax M3 leads on 16 of 24 shared benchmarks versus Inkling-Small's 8 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Inkling-Small and MiniMax M3 are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Inkling-Small has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Inkling-Small through Thinking Machines Lab and MiniMax M3 through MiniMax with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published Thinking Machines Lab API pricing and MiniMax API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://thinkingmachines.ai and https://anotherwrapper.com/tools/llm-pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Inkling-Small supports up to 256K output tokens per request, while MiniMax M3 supports up to 131K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Neither Inkling-Small nor MiniMax M3 has published throughput data on this page yet. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Inkling-Small or MiniMax M3 from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Inkling-Small costs $0.30/M input and $1.20/M output via Thinking Machines Lab. MiniMax M3 costs $0.30/M input and $1.20/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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