Can anybody confirm this? We’re an organization of approx. 250 ppl actively evaluating the Perplexity MCP inside Claude Code and Cursor workflows. I am doing what is in my capabilities to go through the docs and testing costs for multiple scenarios before making a choice and I did this for the past couple weeks. But the more we test it, the weirder the economics start looking and the team is not very communicative on the service email. To be honest I feel like if i start opening the floodgates I will loose control on the spending, there is absolutely no way of having direct attribution of everything unless you have a person solely dedicated to this Here’s what I found out: Perplexity Pro ($20/month): Pretty simple. Human users can search, use Deep Research, ask questions, do normal work. Perplexity MCP / API: Every retrieval and citation context is billed seperately. Even when the actual prompt and output are tiny, the retrieved search context still heavily counts toward usage. Sonar is around ~$1/$1 per 1M tokens, Sonar Pro around ~$3/$15, Sonar Reasoning Pro around ~$2/$8, etc. So initially we thought this would actually end up fairly cheap. But then you realize retrieval depth and citation context massively affect pricing, and that’s not applicable to agentic workflows like the one we run. I would say its more applicable for human based searches. A normal person might do a few searches and move on. Claude Code with MCP enabled will: retry searches rephrase prompts validate answers run paralell lookups recursively search subproblems So in this scenario costs are absolutely unpredictable and can be surprisinly high We had internal eval workflows where the final output was a one-character validation response with tiny outputs. But the MCP was pulling extremely big citation contexts single time. There’s something fundamentally wrong in my understanding here? I am moving towards other solution unless somebody has a solid input on how to handle this and if is there anything wrong into what I said. I would be open to other alternatives if somebody can pinpoint any! Also if the perplexity team can wake up and start getting back maybe there’s a solution? but your docs are unreadable guys submitted by /u/GlitteringTie2554
Originally posted by u/GlitteringTie2554 on r/ClaudeCode
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