DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Inkling

Choose DeepSeek V4 Pro if you want…

• ✓Lower price ($0.54 / 1M blended)
• ✓Larger context window (1.0M)

Choose Inkling if you want…

• ✓Higher intelligence (Artificial Analysis index 46)

DeepSeek V4 Pro

DeepSeek V4 Pro makes a compelling case that frontier-class coding performance and a one-million-token context window do not have to cost frontier-class money. At roughly $0.18 per million tokens blended, it runs 10x cheaper on input and 30x cheaper on output than comparable models, while posting an 80.6% score on SWE-Bench Verified — the highest reported among open-weight models at launch. Users consistently praise its agentic coding ability, noting it competes with or beats larger closed models on multi-step coding tasks, and its hybrid attention architecture handles full-codebase analysis without collapsing under the token budget. The MIT license is a genuine differentiator: weights are freely available for self-hosting, fine-tuning, and commercial integration. The honest caveat: V4 Pro is verbose. It can generate four to five times more output tokens than comparable models on the same prompt, which erodes the per-token savings and makes cost estimation harder than it first appears. Still in preview as of mid-2026, with all benchmark scores currently vendor-reported, it is best suited for teams comfortable with that tradeoff.

Inkling

Inkling is Thinking Machines Lab's first open-weights model, and on just4o.chat it runs through the Vercel AI Gateway under thinkingmachines/inkling. It is a multimodal MoE with 975B total parameters and 41B active, trained to reason over text, images, and audio in a shared space rather than bolting on separate encoders. Controllable thinking effort lets you trade latency for depth, function calling supports agentic workflows, and a 256k context window on the gateway is roomy enough for long multimodal sessions. It is a base-tier model on just4o.chat, billed at 4 base requests per send before length multipliers, at $1.00 per million input and $4.05 per million output tokens (cached input $0.17). Practical caveats: no native web search on this route, and chat attachments currently emphasize image input even though the model itself understands audio. For teams that want an open, customizable multimodal foundation with ZDR-compatible gateway routing, Inkling is a strong addition.