Sonar Nano: pricing, context window and benchmarks
Sonar Nano is a mid-range model from Perplexity. It offers a 4,096-token context window, costs $4.37 per million input tokens and $16.96 per million output tokens, and averages 61.9 across the index's benchmark suite.
Pricing
Sonar Nano costs $4.37 per million input tokens and $16.96 per million output tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix works out to about $7.52 per million tokens. Cached input is listed at $0.49 per million tokens.
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $4.37 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $16.96 | per 1M tokens |
| Cached input | $0.49 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended 3:1 | $7.52 | estimate per 1M tokens |
| 1M in + 1M out | $21.33 | 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 | 65.8 | 439 | 27th | |
| GPQA Diamond | 57.4 | 434 | 28th | |
| SWE-bench Verified | 48.4 | 435 | 28th | |
| HumanEval | 63.7 | 453 | 25th | |
| MATH-500 | 66.7 | 411 | 32th | |
| AIME 2025 | 50.6 | 456 | 24th | |
| LiveCodeBench | 55.1 | 404 | 33th | |
| IFEval | 70.7 | 446 | 26th | |
| TruthfulQA | 68.5 | 409 | 32th | |
| HellaSwag | 75.1 | 441 | 27th | |
| MMMU | 59.2 | 438 | 27th | |
| Arena Elo | 1303.0 | 413 | 31th |
What Sonar Nano is good for
Sonar Nano 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 $4.37 per million input tokens with a 4,096-token window, check its benchmark profile against the specific task before committing.
Strengths
- Balanced specification profile with no single dominant strength.
Trade-offs
- Proprietary licence: you cannot download the weights or self-host the model.
- Context window of 4,096 tokens is small for long-document work.
- Average benchmark score is below the index median; test it on your own task.
How it compares
| Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 4 Maverick 7B | Meta AI | 4096 | $1.52 | 61.9 |
| Qwen3 8B | Alibaba Cloud | 8192 | $1.66 | 61.9 |
| Sonar Nano | Perplexity | 4096 | $4.37 | 61.9 |
| StableLM 2 Base | Stability AI | 8192 | $1.49 | 61.9 |
| GLM-4.6 7B | Zhipu AI | 16384 | $1.52 | 61.8 |
| GPT-NeoX | EleutherAI | 16384 | $1.57 | 61.7 |
FAQ
How much does Sonar Nano cost?
Sonar Nano is listed at $4.37 per million input tokens and $16.96 per million output tokens. Cached input is $0.49 per million tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix is about $7.52 per million tokens.
What is the context window of Sonar Nano?
Sonar Nano has a context window of 4,096 tokens and can emit up to 4,096 output tokens per request in this index.
Is Sonar Nano open weights?
No. Sonar Nano is a proprietary model with a proprietary licence, so you cannot download the weights.
How does Sonar Nano score on benchmarks?
Sonar Nano averages 61.9 across the scored benchmarks in this index, ranking #431 of 600 models. Its strongest relative result is Arena Elo at 1303.0.
What is Sonar Nano best for?
Sonar Nano 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 $4.37 per million input tokens with a 4,096-token window, check its benchmark profile against the specific task before committing.