Sonar pricing
Sonar, Small-tier from OpenRouter, costs $1.00 per 1M input tokens and $1.00 per 1M output tokens.
Input$1.00per 1M tokens
Output$1.00per 1M tokens
Context window127Ktokens
TierSmallOpenRouter
Specs and pricing
| Provider | OpenRouter |
| Tier | Small |
| Context window | 127K tokens |
| Max output | 114K tokens |
| Input price | $1.00 / 1M tokens |
| Output price | $1.00 / 1M tokens |
| Modalities | text, image |
Note. Perplexity's search-augmented model; answers are grounded in live web results, which is the reason to reach for it over a plain chat model, not just the price.
What it costs at realistic volumes
Assuming a 4:1 input:output token ratio, a common shape for chat and RAG-style workloads:
| Volume (4:1 in:out ratio) | Input cost | Output cost | Total / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000,000 in / 250,000 out | $1.00 | $0.25 | $1.25 |
| 10,000,000 in / 2,500,000 out | $10.00 | $2.50 | $12.50 |
| 100,000,000 in / 25,000,000 out | $100.00 | $25.00 | $125.00 |
Cheaper alternatives
Same tier (Small), a different provider, and a lower blended cost at the 4:1 ratio used above:
| Model | Provider | $/1M in | $/1M out | At the 4:1 ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Turbo | DeepInfra | $0.02 | $0.04 | 97.6% cheaper blended |
| schematron-v2-turbo | inference.net | $0.03 | $0.15 | 94.6% cheaper blended |
| Amazon Nova Micro | Amazon (Nova) | $0.035 | $0.14 | 94.4% cheaper blended |
| Command R7B | Cohere | $0.0375 | $0.15 | 94% cheaper blended |
| GPT-OSS 20B | Novita AI | $0.04 | $0.15 | 93.8% cheaper blended |