Perplexity Sonar Pricing 2026: Plans, Costs & Free Tier

About Perplexity Sonar

Perplexity Sonar is the API version of Perplexity's AI search engine. Unlike traditional search APIs that return links, Sonar returns fully-formed answers with inline citations — like having a research assistant that reads the web and writes a sourced response. It comes in two tiers: Sonar (fast, affordable, uses a smaller model) and Sonar Pro (more thorough, uses larger models, performs multi-step research). Sonar is ideal for applications that need grounded, factual answers rather than raw search results. Perplexity processes 100M+ queries per week and Sonar brings that capability to developers via API.

Category: AI Search / Scraping
Provider: Perplexity AI
Billing model: Per-request pricing

Pricing Details

Sonar — Custom pricing

$1 per 1,000 searches. Input: $1/M tokens. Output: $1/M tokens.

$1/1,000 searches
Fast responses
Inline citations
127K context window

Sonar Pro — Custom pricing

$5 per 1,000 searches. Input: $3/M tokens. Output: $15/M tokens.

$5/1,000 searches
Multi-step research
More thorough answers
Higher quality citations

Sonar Reasoning Pro — Custom pricing

Usage-based; $2/1M input, $8/1M output + request fees

Sonar Deep Research — Custom pricing

$5 per request. Comprehensive multi-step research reports.

$5 per research report
Multi-step research
Comprehensive reports
Deep analysis

Pricing verified 2026-03-20. Official pricing page