At 20 requests/user/day (totaling 60,000,000 queries/mo), running Content generation on Perplexity Sonar costs $120,000.00 / month ($1.20 / user / mo).
Total expected API invoice for 100,000 Active Users generating 60,000,000 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 (100,000 Active Users) | Cost / User / Mo | Annual Spend | Context Limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity Sonar (Current) | perplexity | $120,000.00 | $1.20 | $1,440,000.00 | 128,000 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | openai | $93,408.00 | $0.9341 | $1,120,896.00 | 1,050,000 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | openai | $350,280.00 | $3.503 | $4,203,360.00 | 256,000 |
| GPT-5.4 nano | openai | $97,008.00 | $0.9701 | $1,164,096.00 | 128,000 |
| GPT-4o mini | openai | $49,320.00 | $0.4932 | $591,840.00 | 128,000 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | anthropic | $395,040.00 | $3.95 | $4,740,480.00 | 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 100,000 Active Users is $120,000.00.
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.