Sonar
Perplexity · released Jan 27, 2025
- Type
- Closed
- Input
- $1.00
- Output
- $1.00
- Cached
- None held
List price · per 1M tokens · Perplexity at 127K context · source ↗
Our take
Written Sep 4, 2026Sonar is Perplexity's proprietary text-and-image model with a 127,072-token request limit and a flat rate across both hosts. It is built for search-augmented tasks, though no benchmark scores or parameter count are available to verify its quality or size.
Use this for budget-conscious search-augmented tasks where a flat per-million rate is acceptable, or if you are already inside the Perplexity ecosystem and 44 tokens per second meets your latency needs. Skip it if you need verified quality scores, self-hosting, or throughput guarantees on every host.
The case for it
- Identical pricing across both tracked hosts removes provider-shopping friction.
- Flat input and output rate simplifies cost prediction for high-volume workloads.
The case against it
- No benchmark scores in our data — chat, reasoning, coding and multimodal quality are all unverified.
- Throughput is only confirmed on one host; the other does not disclose it.
- Parameter count is undisclosed, so hardware planning for any future local run is impossible.
How good is it?
We hold no score for this model.
So there is no figure here for everyday use, coding, agent work or writing. That is a gap in our data, not a low score.
Where to rent it
Prices checked 2 hours ago — each listing carries its own date.
Perplexity, through OpenRouter
The lab is also the cheapest we hold. The strip above and this offer are the same one, so nothing on this page undercuts Perplexity on 127K of context.
- per 1M tokens
- $1.00 in / $1.00 out
- Context served
- 127K
- Throughput
- ~85 tok/s
| Provider | In / out per 1M tokens | Context | Throughput | Trains on prompts | Logs prompts | Zero retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouterOpenRouter's own listing | $1.00 / $1.00checked 2 hours ago | 127K | not measured | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
| PerplexityThrough OpenRouter | $1.00 / $1.00checked 2 hours ago | 127K114K max reply | 85 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
OpenRouterAcross the 2 listings we hold: 1 says it does not train on prompts, 0 say they do and 1 does not say. 1 appears in the zero-retention registry we check; the rest are unknown to us.
What each host's API supports
From the parameter list each endpoint publishes. Streaming is omitted: nothing we hold reports it, for any model.
| Provider | Tool calling | JSON output | Strict schema |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouterOpenRouter's own listing | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| PerplexityThrough OpenRouter | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Tool calling: 0 of 2 listings say yes, 2 say no. JSON output: 0 of 2 listings say yes, 2 say no. Strict schema: 0 of 2 listings say yes, 2 say no.
When we formed this view
Recent changes
What moved
first indexed by our pipelineEach date is the day we first saw the change, or the day the maker announced it.
What we do not know about this model yet
- No independent board has scored it, so we hold no quality figures at all.
- Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
- 1 of 2 listings does not say whether it trains on prompts.
- We hold no cached-input rate for any of its listings.
- We hold no batch or off-peak rate for any of its listings.
Licence and identifiers
What the licence allowsWe hold no licence record for this model. Inside are the identifiers you need to pull it — its Hugging Face repo where we have one, our slug and a machine-readable card.
Licence
We hold no licence record for this model, and no record of published weights either — so we can neither summarise its terms nor point you at the weights.
Identifiers
- Takes in, gives back
- Text and images in, text out
- Catalogue slug
- perplexity-sonar