Sonar Deep Research

I'm currently testing OpenRouter and noticed that using **"Perplexity: Sonar Deep Research"** is surprisingly expensive. I have two main concerns I'd like to clarify:

# (1). Is there an additional ~40% fee applied by OpenRouter?

According to the pricing listed on [this page ](https://openrouter.ai/perplexity/sonar-deep-research), the cost is:

* $2 per million input tokens
* $8 per million output tokens

For my usage (only 1 prompt), I had:

* 1,937 input tokens
* 83,128 output tokens

A simple calculation gives:

(1,937 * $2 / 1,000,000) + (83,128 * $8 / 1,000,000) = $0.668898

However, I was actually charged **$0.935** , which is significantly higher.

Doing the math:

$0.935 / $0.668898 ≈ 139.78%

This suggests that the total cost is about **39.78% higher** than expected. Could this be due to an extra fee from OpenRouter?

# (2). Why is the OpenRouter price higher than Perplexity's direct pricing?

Looking at Perplexity's official pricing \[here\]([https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/pricing ](https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/pricing)\#detailed-pricing-breakdown-for-sonar-reasoning-pro-and-sonar-pro), it states:

* Output tokens are priced at **$8 per million**
* However, "reasoning tokens" (used internally during research) are only **$3 per million**

Now, here's what confuses me: If OpenRouter is charging me for reasoning tokens as if they were output tokens (i.e., at the **$8/M** rate instead of $3/M).

# Request for Help

\- Could anyone please provide some insight or clarification? Any advice or explanation would be greatly appreciated.
\- Is there any way to minimize cost from this model, such as how to instruct this model not to returning reasoning tokens?

Thank you so much everyone!

I was using the API for sonar deep research a couple weeks ago and it worked just as the deep research worked on the website with FULL reports that were very very long and in-depth. Now, however, the reports it gives are only a couple words and aren't like the full reports that were 1k+ words that it gave before and that it gives on the website.

And.. **it's still as expensive or even more expensive for requests...**

I've been deploying the new 'Sonar-Deep-Research' via the API and I've ran into a few issues.
1. The 'citations' key doesn't always return sources and is sometimes empty.

2. During response, sometimes the output will be something like this at the end of the response (it just says that it will continue or that it stopped responding cause things are too long):

*\[Continuing for remaining sections covering healthcare reforms (Medicaid expansion), education policies (teacher residency programs), cultural developments (Tulip Festival expansion), etc., maintaining similar depth across all topics while adhering strictly to citation protocols and structural requirements.\]*

Not sure if these are known issues or I'm doing something wrong.......