Sonar API Pricing
Perplexity · Budget · Proprietary · released 2025-01. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-09-28.
Sonar has held the same list price since 2026-08-15 and is the 119th cheapest of 142 Budget models. Only one host, Perplexity, sells it, so there is no second price to shop. No Arena score is published for it, so it carries no Efficiency score and cannot hold the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $1.00 per 1M tokens
- Output: $1.00 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: not published
- Context window: 127K
Sonar market position
On blended price ($1.00 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 16% of Budget models: 119th cheapest of 142. Across every category it is cheaper than 58% of priced text models in the catalogue: 119th cheapest of 281.
Sonar licence, size and capabilities
Sonar is recorded here as proprietary: access is through an API, priced by the token. Its parameter count is not published. Listed capabilities: Text, Vision, Code. Filling its 127K context window once costs $0.13 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $200 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $280 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $1.1K |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $430 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $500 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $210 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $270 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $900 |
Sonar pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 1 host. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-09-28 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown.
Perplexity is the only host with a published rate, $1.00 input / $1.00 output per 1M tokens, which is the price shown on this page.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity (the price shown above) | $1.00 | $1.00 |
Sonar price history
Sonar has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $1.00 input / $1.00 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
Alternatives to Sonar
- Next cheaper Budget model: Qwen3.7 Plus (Alibaba) at $0.992 blended, 1% less.
- Next more expensive: ERNIE 4.5 VL 424B A47B (Baidu) at $1.00 blended, under 1% more.
Common questions about Sonar pricing
- How much does Sonar cost?
- Sonar costs $1.00 per million input tokens and $1.00 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does Sonar offer batch or cached pricing?
- No batch or cache pricing is published for this model.
- What would Sonar cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, Sonar costs about $200 at list prices.
- Has the price of Sonar changed?
- Sonar has been in our daily price archive since tracking began on 2026-08-15, when it listed at $1.00 input / $1.00 output per 1M tokens. No list price change since tracking began on 2026-08-15. Last checked against the 2026-09-28 snapshot.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for Sonar in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
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