// head_to_head
Qwen3.8 Flash vs Inkling
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Qwen3.8 Flash wins outright — it scores higher and costs less.
Qwen3.8 Flash leads by 10.0 points overall while listing 7.7× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. Qwen3.8 Flash also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.6321 per point.
qwen
Qwen3.8 Flash
- Blended / 1M
- $0.230
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Aug 26, 2026
- Overall score
- 61.9
thinkingmachines
Inkling
- Blended / 1M
- $1.76
- Context
- 524K
- Released
- Jul 17, 2026
- Overall score
- 51.9
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Qwen3.8 Flash | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 61.9win | 51.9 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.6321win | $3.99 |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $0.230win | $1.76 |
| Input price / 1M | $0.150win | $1.00 |
| Output price / 1M | $0.470win | $4.05 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $0.016win | $0.170 |
| Context window | 1Mwin | 524K |
| Max output tokens | 131K | 472Kwin |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Qwen3.8 Flash on top, Inkling below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Qwen3.8 Flash | Inkling |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $63.95/mo | $504.24/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $94.60/mo | $711.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $82.56/mo | $659.20/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $178.55/mo | $1,262/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $355.00/mo | $2,490/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Qwen3.8 Flash
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.6321 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
Quality matters more than the bill
Qwen3.8 Flash
Highest overall LiveBench score of the two at 61.9.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Qwen3.8 Flash
Leads on coding — 87.4 against 64.0.
You need to fit large documents in one call
Qwen3.8 Flash
Wider context window — 1M against 524K.
Qwen3.8 Flash vs Inkling FAQ
Which is better, Qwen3.8 Flash or Inkling?
Qwen3.8 Flash wins outright — it scores higher and costs less. Qwen3.8 Flash leads by 10.0 points overall while listing 7.7× cheaper per blended million tokens. There is no trade-off to reason about here; the only reason to pick the other is a constraint this table does not show, like an existing contract, a region, or a provider you are already on. Qwen3.8 Flash also leads on measured cost per point of capability, at $0.6321 per point.
Is Qwen3.8 Flash cheaper than Inkling?
Qwen3.8 Flash is cheaper. On a 3:1 input:output blend, Qwen3.8 Flash lists at $0.230 per million tokens and Inkling at $1.76 — Qwen3.8 Flash is 7.7× cheaper. Input and output are priced separately — Qwen3.8 Flash charges $0.150 in and $0.470 out, Inkling charges $1.00 and $4.05 — so the model that looks cheaper flips depending on how output-heavy your workload is.
Qwen3.8 Flash vs Inkling: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Qwen3.8 Flash scores 61.9 and Inkling scores 51.9 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That is a 10.0-point lead for Qwen3.8 Flash. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Qwen3.8 Flash or Inkling?
Qwen3.8 Flash. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Qwen3.8 Flash works out at $0.6321 per point and Inkling at $3.99.
Does Qwen3.8 Flash or Inkling have a bigger context window?
Qwen3.8 Flash has the larger context window: 1M for Qwen3.8 Flash against 524K for Inkling. Note that a window you can fill is not a window you should fill — retrieval quality usually degrades well before the limit, and you pay for every token you put in it.
Do Qwen3.8 Flash and Inkling support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $0.016 per million for Qwen3.8 Flash and $0.170 for Inkling, against full input rates of $0.150 and $1.00. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-09-02, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.