Sonar
by Perplexity · perplexity/sonar · #181 cheapest of 325 paid models
Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC · refreshed hourly
Sonar is lightweight, affordable, fast, and simple to use — now featuring citations and the ability to customize sources. It is designed for companies seeking to integrate lightweight question-and-answer features...
Compare vs:Claude Sonnet 5Claude Opus 4.6Claude Haiku 4.5GPT-5.6 Sol
Pricing
Input
$1.00
per 1M tokens
Output
$1.00
per 1M tokens
Blended (3:1)
$1.00
3 input : 1 output
Cache read
—
per 1M cached tokens
Cache write
—
per 1M tokens
Cache & batch economics
Effective prices for Sonar (no cache-read rate published — hits billed as normal input).
| Cache hit rate | Effective blended $/1M | Example request* | vs no cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | $1.00 | $0.103 | — |
| 50% | $1.00 | $0.103 | −0% |
| 90% | $1.00 | $0.103 | −0% |
*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates (available for OpenAI / Anthropic / Google — not flagged for this creator). Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.
What a request costs
| Workload | Input tokens | Output tokens | Cost / request | Cost / 1K requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short chat message | 500 | 300 | $0.0008 | $0.8 |
| Document summary | 8,000 | 1,000 | $0.009 | $9.00 |
| Codebase question (RAG) | 30,000 | 2,000 | $0.032 | $32.00 |
| Long-context analysis | 150,000 | 5,000 | $0.155 | $155.00 |
Performance
Intelligence Index
9.5
AA composite quality
Coding Index
—
Math Index
—
Agentic Index
—
Output speed
0 tok/s
median
Time to first token
0s
median
Time to first answer
0s
after reasoning tokens
Artificial Analysis benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score |
|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 68.9% |
| GPQA Diamond | 47.1% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 7.3% |
| LiveCodeBench | 29.5% |
| SciCode | 22.9% |
| MATH-500 | 81.7% |
| AIME | 48.7% |
Specs
Context window
127K
tokens
Max output
—
tokens
Input modalities
text, image
Tokenizer
Other