Running Deep Research on 100 Companies Costs ~$100: How Builders Are Cutting Agent Pipeline Bills
Confident-Green-5241 · reddit · 2026-09-10
A developer building a deal-screening product found that while a cheap LLM scoring pass (6 angles per company) scales fine, adding a deep research step—via Perplexity's sonar-deep-research or a custom multi-tool agent—costs roughly $100 for a single run over 100 shortlisted companies, before any reruns.
Ideas being weighed on Reddit:
- Funnel approach: keep cheap screening, send only top 10-15 into deep research
- Reuse research across companies in the same sector or competing with each other
- A middle tier of targeted tool calls instead of full agentic deep research, capturing 80% of the value for far less
- Whether anyone running Perplexity/Parallel task APIs at volume has found pricing tricks, or built a cheaper "lite" deep research
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