Roundup
Best AI Models for Research
Long documents, citations and careful reasoning: the models we reach for when accuracy matters more than speed.
perplexity/sonar
Sonar is lightweight, affordable, fast, and simple to use — now featuring citations and the ability to customize sources. It is designed for companies seeking to integrate lightweight question-and-answer features...
Source: OpenRouter (live)
Prices as listed on OpenRouter, refreshed every five minutes. Provider-direct prices may differ. Convert to your currency on the AI Tracker.
Capabilities
Capabilities are read from the provider listing. “Not declared” means the listing does not advertise the feature, not that it is absent.
Why it costs this
Alternatives
Perplexity
$6.00
/M blended
Perplexity: Sonar Reasoning Pro
Perplexity
$3.50
/M blended
Perplexity
$6.00
/M blended
Perplexity: Sonar Deep Research
Perplexity
$3.50
/M blended
Alternatives
ByteDance Seed: Seed 2.1 Turbo
Bytedance Seed
$1.00
/M blended
Anthropic: Claude Haiku 4.5 (batch)
Anthropic
$1.00
/M blended
Z.ai (Zhipu)
$1.00
/M blended
Aion Labs
$1.00
/M blended
Aion Labs
$1.00
/M blended
Nousresearch
$1.00
/M blended
Within ±50% of $1.00/M blended.
Analysis
Roundup
Long documents, citations and careful reasoning: the models we reach for when accuracy matters more than speed.
Search-grounded answer models. All Perplexity models · Official site
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