Qwen3.6 Flash vs Thinking Machines Inkling Small
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Qwen3.6 Flash is 1.5× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Qwen3.6 Flash accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 524K tokens.
- Inkling Small is the newer model (released 2026-07-30).
| Qwen3.6 Flash | Inkling Small | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Qwen | Thinking Machines |
| Released | 2026-04-27 | 2026-07-30 |
| Input / 1M | $0.188 | $0.45 |
| Output / 1M | $1.13 | $1.20 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.10 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.422 | $0.637 |
| Context | 1M | 524K |
| Max output | 66K | 262K |
| Accepts | text, image, video | text, image, audio |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $1.13 | $1.20 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | — |
Cost calculator
Qwen3.6 Flash
$28.13 per month$0.94 per day
Inkling Small
$45.00 per month$1.50 per day
Qwen3.6 Flash saves $16.88 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Qwen3.6 Flash with