Command R
The cost-efficient mid-tier of the Command line, built for scalable RAG and routine enterprise tasks. It keeps the family's grounding strengths at a lower price than R+.
At a glance
Released
Jul 9, 2026
Provider
Cohere
Context window
128,000 tokens
Max output
8,000 tokens
Modalities
Text → text
Knowledge cutoff
March 2026
API model ID
command-rLicense
Open weights (CC-BY-NC, research)
Pricing
Standard
Input$0.15 / 1M
Output$0.60 / 1M
* Rates are from a third-party aggregator — verify before relying on them. A typical 1,500-token prompt with a 650-token answer costs ≈ $0.0006 on the standard tier. Run your own prompt through the calculator →
Best use cases
Scalable RAG
Handles high-volume retrieval workloads at a lower per-token cost.
Business chat
Powers internal assistants grounded in company data.
Summarization
Condenses documents with reliable source attribution.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Good RAG grounding
- Lower cost than R+
- Enterprise-ready
Limitations
- Less capable than R+ on complex tasks
- Research-only license
How to test it
- No-code: open the Cohere dashboard and run a prompt in the playground.
- API: create a key in the Cohere dashboard and call the API (example below).
curl https://api.cohere.ai/compatibility/v1/chat/completions \
# OpenAI-compatible endpoint
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "command-r",
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Explain tokenization in one paragraph."}]
}'