At 20 requests/user/day (totaling 6,000 queries/mo), running Content generation on Perplexity Sonar costs $12.00 / month ($1.20 / user / mo).
Total expected API invoice for 10 Active Users generating 6,000 queries.
Direct inference cost per MAU to model your SaaS pricing tiers and gross margins.
Savings generated by exploiting 30% cache hits on prompt context.
| Model | Provider | Monthly Spend (10 Active Users) | Cost / User / Mo | Annual Spend | Context Limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity Sonar (Current) | perplexity | $12.00 | $1.20 | $144.00 | 128,000 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | openai | $9.341 | $0.9341 | $112.09 | 1,050,000 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | openai | $35.028 | $3.503 | $420.336 | 256,000 |
| GPT-5.4 nano | openai | $9.701 | $0.9701 | $116.41 | 128,000 |
| GPT-4o mini | openai | $4.932 | $0.4932 | $59.184 | 128,000 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | anthropic | $39.504 | $3.95 | $474.048 | 1,000,000 |
At 20 queries per user/day with Perplexity Sonar, the estimated cost is $1.20 per monthly active user (MAU). Total monthly bill for 10 Active Users is $12.00.
Assuming a 30% cache hit rate on repeated system and context tokens, prompt caching saves $0.00 per month ($0.00/year) on Perplexity Sonar.
With a direct COGS of $1.20 per user/month on Perplexity Sonar, charging at least $6.00 per user/month ensures an 80%+ software gross margin.