DeepSeek V3 vs Perplexity Sonar
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- DeepSeek V3 is 2.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- DeepSeek V3 accepts longer prompts: 164K vs 127K tokens.
- Sonar is the newer model (released 2025-01-27).
| DeepSeek V3 | Sonar | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | DeepSeek | Perplexity |
| Released | 2024-12-26 | 2025-01-27 |
| Input / 1M | $0.257 | $1.00 |
| Output / 1M | $1.03 | $1.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.45 | $1.00 |
| Context | 164K | 127K |
| Max output | 16K | 114K |
| Accepts | text | text, image |
| Reasoning | No | No |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 3 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.89 | $1.00 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 99.51% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | Operational | Operational |
Cost calculator
DeepSeek V3
$30.87 per month$1.03 per day
Sonar
$75.00 per month$2.50 per day
DeepSeek V3 saves $44.13 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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