Sonar: pricing, context window and benchmarks
Sonar is a multimodal model from Perplexity. It offers a 200,000-token context window, costs $10.57 per million input tokens and $50.13 per million output tokens, and averages 76.0 across the index's benchmark suite.
Pricing
Sonar costs $10.57 per million input tokens and $50.13 per million output tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix works out to about $20.46 per million tokens. Cached input is listed at $1.28 per million tokens.
| Item | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $10.57 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $50.13 | per 1M tokens |
| Cached input | $1.28 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended 3:1 | $20.46 | estimate per 1M tokens |
| 1M in + 1M out | $60.70 | 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 | 79.1 | 207 | 66th | |
| GPQA Diamond | 71.2 | 237 | 61th | |
| SWE-bench Verified | 65.8 | 198 | 67th | |
| HumanEval | 81.9 | 188 | 69th | |
| MATH-500 | 76.3 | 294 | 51th | |
| AIME 2025 | 73.9 | 187 | 69th | |
| LiveCodeBench | 68.5 | 217 | 64th | |
| IFEval | 84.7 | 198 | 67th | |
| TruthfulQA | 78.7 | 230 | 62th | |
| HellaSwag | 86.0 | 217 | 64th | |
| MMMU | 70.1 | 300 | 50th | |
| Arena Elo | 1394.1 | 233 | 61th |
What Sonar is good for
Sonar 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 $10.57 per million input tokens with a 200,000-token window, check its benchmark profile against the specific task before committing.
Strengths
- Large 200,000-token context window for long documents and agent traces.
- 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.
- Premium input pricing at $10.57 per million tokens.
How it compares
| Model | Provider | Context | Input / 1M | Avg score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Command R+ Chat | Cohere | 32768 | $4.02 | 76.0 |
| Gemini 3 Flash Mini | Google DeepMind | 200000 | $10.71 | 76.0 |
| Llama 3.1 Cerebras | Cerebras | 128000 | $4.01 | 76.0 |
| Llama 3.1 Cerebras Chat | Cerebras | 32768 | $4.07 | 76.0 |
| Seed-OSS Instruct | ByteDance | 128000 | $3.79 | 76.0 |
| Sonar | Perplexity | 200000 | $10.57 | 76.0 |
FAQ
How much does Sonar cost?
Sonar is listed at $10.57 per million input tokens and $50.13 per million output tokens. Cached input is $1.28 per million tokens. A blended 3:1 input-to-output mix is about $20.46 per million tokens.
What is the context window of Sonar?
Sonar has a context window of 200,000 tokens and can emit up to 32,768 output tokens per request in this index.
Is Sonar open weights?
No. Sonar is a proprietary model with a proprietary licence, so you cannot download the weights.
How does Sonar score on benchmarks?
Sonar averages 76.0 across the scored benchmarks in this index, ranking #225 of 600 models. Its strongest relative result is Arena Elo at 1394.1.
What is Sonar best for?
Sonar 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 $10.57 per million input tokens with a 200,000-token window, check its benchmark profile against the specific task before committing.