Pricing Structure is overly complex and confusing

[joryphillips]

Sonar API has a multi-dimensional pricing array that is very confusing.

I went down the road of trying to figure out how to use it to get the data I am looking to collect and organize, and after a few hours of hit and miss results I finally saw that Tier 3 is needed to get structured JSON. Tier 3 requires $500 in credits? I am happy to write some regex to make my own JSON for that price.

It is especially disappointing to (apparently) need to buy that many credits just to test out the results and compare them across models.

I realize that you have to protect yourselves against people gaming the system, but these constraints and complexity are ultimately pushing me away from what initially looked like a great product.

[smttsp]

it is not complex, it is dishonest. You ask a question and they retrieve 20 citations for which they charge you as well. It is not the industry standard and they buried that knowledge deep inside their documentation. When you ask about it, here is how they respond:

Hi @smttsp, We explain this in the pricing breakdown here (https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/pricing#detailed-pricing-breakdown-for-sonar-reasoning-pro-and-sonar-pro) but we will make it more clear and visible in the docs.

I did some small tests. about 2-2.5m input tokens cost me $180. Because these "accurate and trusted" guys retrieve 50-60m tokens for my prompts and charge those as well. So, the realist cost of 1m token is about $50-60 in perplexity.

[joryphillips]

I saw the new pricing structure that was just announced -- I think it might have gotten even more complex. However, at least the presentation is somewhat clearer.

Why bother applying high, medium, and low prices across tokens when those do not change?

And it is still not clear how exactly billing/invoicing works for tokens + requests.

Perplexity should show an example API request with response and detail the costs that would be associated with it.

[smttsp]

Well, for me, it doesn't matter. I am done with perplexity. I am avoiding dishonest businesses.