Perplexity: Sonar Deep Research

perplexity/sonar-deep-research

Sonar Deep Research is a research-focused model designed for multi-step retrieval, synthesis, and reasoning across complex topics. It autonomously searches, reads, and evaluates sources, refining its approach as it gathers information. This enables comprehensive report generation across domains like finance, technology, health, and current events.

Notes on Pricing (Source(opens in new tab))

Input tokens comprise of Prompt tokens (user prompt) + Citation tokens (these are processed tokens from running searches)
Deep Research runs multiple searches to conduct exhaustive research. Searches are priced at $5/1000 searches. A request that does 30 searches will cost $0.15 in this step.
Reasoning is a distinct step in Deep Research since it does extensive automated reasoning through all the material it gathers during its research phase. Reasoning tokens here are a bit different than the CoTs in the answer - these are tokens that we use to reason through the research material prior to generating the outputs via the CoTs. Reasoning tokens are priced at $3/1M tokens

Modalities

In / Out Price

High

$2 / $8per 1M

Context

Avg

128K

Released

Mar 7, 2025

Providers

This model is hosted by one provider. OpenRouter forwards every request to it directly — no routing decisions to make.

Performance

Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).

Pricing

List price is the headline rate per million tokens. Effective price is what you actually pay after prompt caching is applied — for repeated context, this can be 60–80% cheaper. The chart below shows the rolling effective price over the past 30 days.

Apps

Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.

Activity

Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.

Uptime

Percent of requests that succeeded over the last 30 days. OpenRouter monitors every provider continuously and automatically retries on the next-best provider when one returns an error.

Quick Start

Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.