# Claude Sonnet 5 vs Inkling

On provider list prices, Inkling costs $1.87 per million input tokens against $3 for Claude Sonnet 5: 1.6x apart. Output is $4.68 against $15 (3.2x). On Allocate both bill at list plus the 7% transaction fee.

## Specifications

| | Claude Sonnet 5 | Inkling |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lab | Anthropic | Thinking Machines |
| Access | API only | Open weights |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| List price, input | $3 / M tokens | $1.87 / M tokens |
| List price, output | $15 / 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 $8,850 on Claude Sonnet 5 at list: a gap of $4,968, or 2.3x.

## Choose Claude Sonnet 5 for

- Judgment calls with policy context
- Customer-facing writing
- Review and escalation flows

## Choose Inkling for

- The lower list price ($1.87 in / $4.68 out per M tokens)
- Open weights you can fine-tune and own
- Fine-tuning under a permissive license (Apache 2.0)

## Common questions

### Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 5 or Inkling?

Inkling, on this workload shape. At list prices it is $1.87/$4.68 per million tokens in and out against $3/$15 for Claude Sonnet 5. Billed on Allocate: $2.00/$5.01 against $3.21/$16.05, list plus 7%.

### Which has the bigger context window?

They match: both read 1,000,000 tokens (1M) per request.

### Can I fine-tune Claude Sonnet 5 or Inkling?

Inkling publishes open weights (Apache 2.0) and can be fine-tuned on your own data. Claude Sonnet 5 is a closed model served over API; its weights are not available.

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[HTML page](https://allocate.network/compare/sonnet-5-vs-thinkingmachines-inkling) · [Claude Sonnet 5](https://allocate.network/models/sonnet-5.md) · [Inkling](https://allocate.network/models/thinkingmachines-inkling.md) · [Machine-readable catalog](https://allocate.network/catalog.json)