{
  "slug": "perplexity-api",
  "name": "Perplexity API",
  "url": "https://docs.perplexity.ai",
  "cat": "search",
  "group": "back",
  "tagline": "Grounded answer API with citations",
  "price": "Sonar $1/M input and $1/M output tokens; Sonar Pro $3/M in, $15/M out; Sonar Reasoning Pro and Deep Research $2/M in, $8/M out. Request fee $5-$12 per 1K by search context size. Search API $5 per 1K requests with no token cost.",
  "tier": "paid",
  "pick": false,
  "what": "Perplexity's search-grounded Sonar models exposed through an OpenAI-compatible chat API. Every response is generated against live web results and returns with citations. A separate Search API returns ranked web results with no generation at all, billed flat at $5 per 1,000 requests.",
  "why": "One call replaces the whole search-then-summarize pipeline — you get a cited answer instead of building retrieval yourself. Drop-in for any code already using the OpenAI SDK.",
  "warn": "You pay a <b>per-request search fee on top of tokens</b>, so real bills run well above the headline token rate. You cannot control which sources it grounds on.",
  "category": {
    "key": "search",
    "name": "Search, vector & RAG",
    "desc": "Keyword search, vector stores, and web-search APIs for agents — three different things.",
    "group": "back",
    "groupName": "Give it a backend"
  },
  "freshness": null,
  "health": {
    "ok": true,
    "status_code": 200,
    "final_url": "https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/getting-started/overview",
    "checked_at": "2026-08-18T18:09:22.039+00:00"
  },
  "corrected_at": null,
  "upstream_changed_at": null
}