Sonar Mini: pricing, context window and benchmarks
Sonar Mini is a mid-range model from Perplexity. It offers a 65,536-token context window, costs $6.52 per million input tokens and $35.69 per million output tokens, and averages 67.9 across the index's benchmark suite.
Pricing
Sonar Mini costs $6.52 per million input tokens and $35.69 per million output tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix works out to about $13.81 per million tokens. Cached input is listed at $0.67 per million tokens.
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $6.52 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $35.69 | per 1M tokens |
| Cached input | $0.67 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended 3:1 | $13.81 | estimate per 1M tokens |
| 1M in + 1M out | $42.21 | estimate |
Benchmarks
Scores below are modelled estimates on a 0–100 scale. Use them to compare relative position, not as official vendor results.
| Benchmark | Score | Rank | Percentile | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU-Pro | 71.2 | 388 | 35th | |
| GPQA Diamond | 60.4 | 401 | 33th | |
| SWE-bench Verified | 56.9 | 369 | 39th | |
| HumanEval | 70.4 | 390 | 35th | |
| MATH-500 | 72.7 | 360 | 40th | |
| AIME 2025 | 60.4 | 385 | 36th | |
| LiveCodeBench | 55.1 | 403 | 33th | |
| IFEval | 77.5 | 373 | 38th | |
| TruthfulQA | 74.0 | 354 | 41th | |
| HellaSwag | 81.7 | 355 | 41th | |
| MMMU | 67.0 | 360 | 40th | |
| Arena Elo | 1334.4 | 383 | 36th |
What Sonar Mini is good for
Sonar Mini is a general-purpose model in the index. It handles text generation, summarization and question answering, and it can be a sensible default when you need a balance of quality, price and context. At $6.52 per million input tokens with a 65,536-token window, check its benchmark profile against the specific task before committing.
Strengths
- Accepts more than text, including image input where the provider supports it.
Trade-offs
- Proprietary licence: you cannot download the weights or self-host the model.
- Average benchmark score is below the index median; test it on your own task.
How it compares
| Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mixtral Groq Base | Groq | 32768 | $2.66 | 68.4 |
| Hunyuan-Turbo Mini | Tencent | 8192 | $6.59 | 68.3 |
| Molmo Instruct | Allen Institute for AI | 32768 | $2.53 | 68.3 |
| Sonar Mini | Perplexity | 65536 | $6.52 | 67.9 |
| Grok 3 Nano | xAI | 8192 | $7.12 | 67.8 |
| Arctic Base | Snowflake | 32768 | $2.27 | 67.5 |
FAQ
How much does Sonar Mini cost?
Sonar Mini is listed at $6.52 per million input tokens and $35.69 per million output tokens. Cached input is $0.67 per million tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix is about $13.81 per million tokens.
What is the context window of Sonar Mini?
Sonar Mini has a context window of 65,536 tokens and can emit up to 16,384 output tokens per request in this index.
Is Sonar Mini open weights?
No. Sonar Mini is a proprietary model with a proprietary licence, so you cannot download the weights.
How does Sonar Mini score on benchmarks?
Sonar Mini averages 67.9 across the scored benchmarks in this index, ranking #383 of 600 models. Its strongest relative result is Arena Elo at 1334.4.
What is Sonar Mini best for?
Sonar Mini is a general-purpose model in the index. It handles text generation, summarization and question answering, and it can be a sensible default when you need a balance of quality, price and context. At $6.52 per million input tokens with a 65,536-token window, check its benchmark profile against the specific task before committing.