Sonar Small Online API pricing

What Sonar Small Online costs in practice

Sonar Small Online from Perplexity is billed at free per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens. No separate prompt-cache rate is published for it, so every input token is billed at the full rate. It ranks #12 of 1557 priced chat listings by input price, which makes it Infinity× cheaper than the median priced model here ($0.6).

Three concrete workloads on this model's rates: a 20,000 requests/day support bot sending 2,500 tokens in and 400 out costs about $67.2 a month; summarising 5,000 documents a day at 12,000 tokens in and a 600-token summary costs about $25.2; and 1,000 agent sessions a day at 30,000 input and 5,000 output tokens costs about $42.

How Perplexity bills: Perplexity charges per request or per token depending on the endpoint, and its Sonar models are billed through the same account as the consumer product. The rate above is the one this index normalises to (USD per million tokens); the authoritative figure is always the provider's own pricing page, linked below.

The figure above excludes batch and committed-use discounts, regional rates, free tiers and enterprise agreements — providers publish those separately, and they can move the real bill by tens of percent. Context is listed as 12K tokens with at most 12K tokens of output per call; some providers bill requests above a long-context threshold at a higher tier, which this page does not model. Token counting also differs between providers' tokenizers, so two providers quoting the same rate can bill a different total for the same text.

Use Sonar Small Online when you need this exact model's output profile and the monthly figure above fits the budget. If it does not, Gemini Exp 1114 (Google Gemini) is the nearest cheaper option at free per million input tokens — keep the capability flags in mind before swapping, since a cheaper model that lacks one of the features above will cost more once you work around it.