Direct air capture (DAC) technologies are projected to play a crucial role in addressing climate change by removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, allowing us to mitigate the long-term consequences of existing atmospheric carbon dioxide and achieve net-zero emissions. The key component in DAC technologies is the material used to capture and separate CO2 from the air. Solid adsorbents, in contrast to liquid absorbents, offer advantages such as lower energy requirements for regeneration, modularity, and mitigation of corrosion and evaporation challenges. Many promising adsorbents have been proposed for DAC to date, including metalorganic frameworks, zeolites, and supported amine materials. The primary challenge for widescale DAC implementation is not whether sorbents can effectively remove CO2 from the air, as operational DAC plants currently exist. Instead, the most significant hurdle is the economic viability of DAC. In contrast to postcombustion CO2 capture processes, in which revenue for the CO2 emitter is still possible, DAC lacks an intrinsic revenue source. This has driven an intense effort on advancing sorbent materials to reduce process costs, including increasing CO2 capacity, reducing regeneration energy requirements, and increasing sorbent stability. However, many of these sorbent properties are interconnected, often in inverse relationships. For example, increasing the CO2 affinity increases the CO2 uptake, but it also increases the CO2 heat of adsorption, thus increasing regeneration energy demands. Similarly, increasing the desorption temperature can improve the working capacity, but it may also accelerate the degradation rate and shorten the sorbent lifetime. Without the guidance of an economic model tailored to DAC, it is challenging to determine whether improving one property actually reduces overall process costs when considering other properties. While many promising adsorbents with varying capacity, heat of adsorption, and stability have been proposed for DAC, it is unclear which combination of properties, if any, provides the most economically viable option due to the complex relationships between sorbent properties and process cost. This complexity has left materials researchers without clear guidelines or priorities for performance metrics.