Sonar Reasoning API pricing
Published on-demand rates for Perplexity's perplexity/sonar-reasoning, captured 2026-09-21 from public pricing data and committed to our archive. Context window 128k tokens; first observed in our archive 2025-05-12.
| Meter | USD per 1M tokens |
|---|---|
| Input | $1.00 |
| Output | $5.00 |
| Cached inputno published cache-read rate; the whole input bills at the standard rate | — |
Standard on-demand rates. Excludes batch endpoints and negotiated pricing; confirm on Perplexity's pricing page before committing.
What it costs on a real workload
Per 1M tokens processed, at the rates above. How the four profiles are defined.
| Profile | In / out mix | Cached share | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retrieval | 800k / 200k | 70% | $1.80 |
| Chat | 500k / 500k | 30% | $3.00 |
| Content | 200k / 800k | 20% | $4.20 |
| Agent | 900k / 100k | 85% | $1.40 |
Observed rate history
No repricing observed since this model entered our archive on 2025-05-12. When a rate moves, the change appears here and on the sitewide ticker.
What the record shows
Sonar Reasoning has not repriced once since it entered our archive on 2025-05-12. That is the ordinary case rather than the exception: providers ship new models at lower rates far more often than they cut the price of one already in service, which is why a cheaper option usually arrives as a new name rather than as a smaller number on this page.
Against the 40 models we price, it is the 25th cheapest for retrieval-shaped work, which reads a great deal and writes little, and the 25th cheapest for content-shaped work, which does the reverse. The two are close, so it holds its position whichever way your workload leans.
It charges 5.0 times more for output than for input, against a median of 5.0 times across the set. That is close to typical for the models we track.
Inside Perplexity's own lineup it is the 2nd cheapest of the 4 models we track on this workload, so 1 cheaper and 2 more expensive options sit on the same account behind the same key.
One other model we price charges exactly $1.00 in and $5.00 out: Claude Haiku 4.5. Where a rate ties exactly, price has stopped being the deciding factor and this site has nothing further to tell you: that choice comes down to your own evaluations, which we do not run and do not score.
Perplexity publishes no cache-read rate for it, so a prompt prefix you send on every call costs the same as text the model has never seen. On a cache-heavy workload that is a structural disadvantage against models that publish one, and it is why the agent profile above prices its whole input at the standard rate.
Whether it accepts image input is not stated in the source we capture, and we do not guess at it.
Its 128k token context window holds roughly 96,000 words of English text in a single request. A workload that does not fit cannot run here at any price, which is a capability limit rather than a cost one.
Priced near this one
Closest to Sonar Reasoning on a retrieval workload, cheaper and more expensive alike. Cost only; we publish no quality score.
| Model | Provider | Input | Output | vs Sonar Reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral Medium 3.5 | Mistral | $1.50 | $7.50 | 8% more |
| Grok 4.6 | xAI | $2.00 | $6.00 | 9% more |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Anthropic | $1.00 | $5.00 | 28% less |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | $1.25 | $10.00 | 32% more |
Retrieval profile: 800k in, 200k out, 70% cached where offered.
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