# Claude Opus 4.8 vs Inkling

On provider list prices, Inkling costs $1.87 per million input tokens against $5 for Claude Opus 4.8: 2.7x apart. Output is $4.68 against $25 (5.3x). On Allocate both bill at list plus the 7% transaction fee.

## Specifications

| | Claude Opus 4.8 | Inkling |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lab | Anthropic | Thinking Machines |
| Access | API only | Open weights |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 1M tokens |
| List price, input | $5 / M tokens | $1.87 / M tokens |
| List price, output | $25 / M tokens | $4.68 / M tokens |
| Cached input | n/a | $0.37 / M tokens |
| License | Proprietary API | Apache 2.0 |
| Fine-tunable | No | Yes |

Specifications and provider list prices from the Allocate catalog, checked 2026-07-08. Billed price is list plus the 7% transaction fee.

## What the numbers say

Take 1,000,000 requests a month at 1,200 input and 350 output tokens each. That workload costs $3,882 a month on Inkling and $14,750 on Claude Opus 4.8 at list: a gap of $10,868, or 3.8x.

Inkling reads 1M tokens per request against 200K for Claude Opus 4.8, 5.0x the window. That decides which one can take whole documents without splitting them.

## Choose Claude Opus 4.8 for

- Hardest reasoning problems
- High-stakes analysis
- Escalation tier for agents

## Choose Inkling for

- The lower list price ($1.87 in / $4.68 out per M tokens)
- The longer context window (1M vs 200K tokens)
- Open weights you can fine-tune and own

## Common questions

### Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.8 or Inkling?

Inkling, on this workload shape. At list prices it is $1.87/$4.68 per million tokens in and out against $5/$25 for Claude Opus 4.8. Billed on Allocate: $2.00/$5.01 against $5.35/$26.75, list plus 7%.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Inkling: 1,000,000 tokens (1M) against 200,000 (200K) for Claude Opus 4.8.

### Can I fine-tune Claude Opus 4.8 or Inkling?

Inkling publishes open weights (Apache 2.0) and can be fine-tuned on your own data. Claude Opus 4.8 is a closed model served over API; its weights are not available.

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[HTML page](https://allocate.network/compare/opus-4-8-vs-thinkingmachines-inkling) · [Claude Opus 4.8](https://allocate.network/models/opus-4-8.md) · [Inkling](https://allocate.network/models/thinkingmachines-inkling.md) · [Machine-readable catalog](https://allocate.network/catalog.json)