At 6 requests/user/day (totaling 9,000 queries/mo), running Customer support chatbot on Perplexity Sonar costs $34.65 / month ($0.693 / user / mo).
Total expected API invoice for 50 Active Users generating 9,000 queries.
Direct inference cost per MAU to model your SaaS pricing tiers and gross margins.
Savings generated by exploiting 70% cache hits on prompt context.
| Model | Provider | Monthly Spend (50 Active Users) | Cost / User / Mo | Annual Spend | Context Limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity Sonar (Current) | perplexity | $34.65 | $0.693 | $415.80 | 128,000 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | openai | $6.111 | $0.1222 | $73.332 | 1,050,000 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | openai | $22.916 | $0.4583 | $274.995 | 256,000 |
| GPT-5.4 nano | openai | $6.269 | $0.1254 | $75.222 | 128,000 |
| GPT-4o mini | openai | $4.961 | $0.0992 | $59.535 | 128,000 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | anthropic | $27.405 | $0.5481 | $328.86 | 1,000,000 |
At 6 queries per user/day with Perplexity Sonar, the estimated cost is $0.693 per monthly active user (MAU). Total monthly bill for 50 Active Users is $34.65.
Assuming a 70% 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 $0.693 per user/month on Perplexity Sonar, charging at least $3.465 per user/month ensures an 80%+ software gross margin.