Sonar - Kyma API

Overview

sonar is Perplexity’s live web-search model. Instead of answering from training data alone, it runs a real-time search of the web on every request and returns a current answer with citations. Reach for it when the answer depends on fresh information — news, prices, scores, releases, schedules, or docs that change after a model’s training cutoff. Sonar does its own searching internally. You send a question; it returns a grounded, cited answer. There is no tool-calling step for you to wire up — and no tool-calling support if you wanted one (see below).

Specs

Field	Value
Model ID	`sonar`
Best for	Live web search, current events, research with citations
Context window	127K
Max output tokens	4K
Input modalities	Text, image
Output modalities	Text
Tool calling	No
Structured outputs	No
Prompt caching	No
Speed	Medium
Cost band	Balanced
Release stage	Stable

Pricing

Sonar bills two ways on the same request:

Tokens — $1.35 / 1M input,$ 1.35 / 1M output, just like any chat model.
Web-search fee — a flat $0.00675 per request, on top of tokens, because every call performs a live search.

Short questions are dominated by the search fee, not the tokens. Every response’s usage.cost already includes the search fee. See Pricing → Web search for the full explanation.

Use this when

The answer depends on current information — news, prices, releases, schedules, live status.
You want sources: Sonar returns citations alongside the answer.
You want web grounding without building your own search + scrape + RAG pipeline.

Pick something else when

You need deeper, multi-step research or longer cited reports: use sonar-pro.
You need function calling / tools: Sonar has none — use kimi-k2.6 or qwen-3.6-plus.
The task does not need fresh web data: a standard model is cheaper, with no per-request search fee.

Example

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://kymaapi.com/v1", api_key="ky-...")

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="sonar",  # or the alias "search"
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What shipped in the latest Bun release, and when?"}]
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Alias	Resolves to
`search`	`sonar`

GLM 4.7 Flash Sonar Pro

​Overview

​Specs

​Pricing

​Use this when

​Pick something else when

​Example

​Related aliases