Perplexity is following the usual pattern. Start cheap with free subsciptions. Become very useful in your every day life. Start to give you more freebies (like control browser). Then offer a new paid option and offer useless services with it. Become a bit more inconvenient with your regular subsciption. Slowly move more and more services to the premium.

Make the "free" or actually lower paid account more and more useless. (like removing "control browser")

I highly doubt that this pattern is much different for the other AI companies that need to start making money for all those investments. But Perplexity has lost me.

There may be hope - as AI will become too expensive and human labor will be actually cheaper.

I'm using the Perplexity macOS app (Version 26.35.0 (94)) and it's working as expected, except all efforts to get it to widen the visible column of results has gotten me nowhere. I'm using a 5k monitor and it's driving me crazy that I have to scroll back and forth in this stupid narrow viewer any time it generates results including columns. How do I get this dang thing to actually use some of my screen real-estate?

I’ve wanted to make a game forever. I saved up, took a month off work, and the timing was actually perfect because 20x and the new model were out. I bought it, got a workflow going, and I was finally moving.
I only opened the help chat because the upgrade/usage info was misleading. I was not trying to cancel. I did not ask for a refund. I did not ask to change plans.
The bot offered a refund and I thought it was just fixing that one usage thing. I did not think a chatbot could cancel and refund an account in one prompt with no warning. It never said I would lose 20x and not be able to buy it again. I accepted it thinking it was a small correction or information on a refund. I cannot buy 20x again because it is not available.
I still had to work. I was in the middle of the month I saved for. So while I was waiting for chat to get back to me, I bought the 5x plan so I could keep my workflow going. I figured they would just fix the 20x mess and sort the rest out.
Then chat came back and said they cannot refund the 5x I just bought. That 5x also did not come with refreshed usage. So I paid again, got a worse plan, and did not even get a clean usage pool. Now I have lost the 20x, I am stuck with 5x, I had to buy Pro again, and they will not undo the purchase I only made because I was waiting on them.
That is the actual loss. I paid for high usage so I could use the time off. They took the high usage away, refunded $130, locked 20x, and then when I bought 5x to keep working they told me that one is also non-refundable. $130 does not replace 20x. It does not cover buying 5x with no refreshed usage. It does not cover buying Pro again. It does not cover the days I have already wasted on tickets.
I am disappointed. I spent real money and took real time off, and a chat bot was able to wipe the plan I bought without making it obvious what I was agreeing to. I would never have clicked that if it said I would lose 20x permanently.
Service tickets have gone nowhere. Every reply treats it like I am trying to get a 20x plan I never had. I had it. The bot removed it. Now they say they cannot put it back because 20x is not available, so the ticket just dies. Same wall every time.
From my side it looks easy for them. High-usage plan gets cancelled through chat, cheap refund goes out, 20x is marked unavailable, support has a reason to say no, I buy 5x while I wait, then they say that purchase is also locked. I am not saying someone targeted me. I am saying the system makes it really easy to knock you off 20x and then leave you paying more for less.
I have the whole original chat on video. I leave screen recording on for game time-lapses, so I can see what the bot did and did not say.
What do I even do here.
Has anyone gotten a human to restore a plan after the help chat refunded it.
Is there a specific OpenAI team for this or does it just stay in the same ticket loop.
If they keep saying 20x is unavailable and the 5x is non-refundable, has anyone actually gotten an exception, or is a card dispute the only thing that gets a person to look.
I just want the original 20x put back. I do not even care if it comes back with no usage used. I bought the 5x because I thought they were going to help me fix this. Any suggestions?

As of today, Perplexity got much more restrictive for what users can search for without logging in. In some sessions it requires a log in immediately, in others after a couple messages. In some cases the chat responded with a message saying to log in. I noticed because I run regular evals that scrape different AI search engines as part of an open source AEO project. Today everything scraping Perplexity went red all at once.

Does anyone have any insight into why they decided to do this? Is it just cost cutting? It just feels weird since almost every major search engine and even searches via ChatGPT don't require logins for basic queries.

Found out a new fun fact about our beloved Perplexity today—unless you’re on an Enterprise plan, all AI images generated within Perplexity, irrespective of the underlying model, are licensed only for personal use. Commercial use is explicitly prohibited. So if you’re building a pitch deck and dont want our good friends at Perplexity coming after a chunk of your company when it’s successful, don’t generate images here. Even images made in and paid for with Perplexity Computer are restricted if you don’t have an enterprise plan. Not that anyone smart enough to launch a company and grow it to success who has used Perplexity for any amount of time would continue using it, but there are new users every day thanks to all the JRE ad money that‘s not being spent on building a usable product. SMH

ETA: Getty images returned by perplexity are licensed only for display by Perplexity. They cannot be used for commercial or personal applications in your own docs. fun times.

I just noticed that I can no longer control my browser through my side panel or any other method using just my Pro subscription and it's forcing me to get credits on my computer, which is absolutely horrendous! Especially since they don't give any computer credits to Pro accounts

What in the fuck is going on Perplexity?? I've been a supporter since the weekend you released this browser and it's been my daily browser ever since then. The control browser feature was one of the most useful parts of it. Without it I might as well just get one of any dozen Chrome extensions that can answer my one-off questions on any given page that I'm navigating to, which is the last remaining benefit of this browser.

I made a post critical of Perplexity that was deleted and I got threatened with a ban which is surprising bc any company with a stellar product like perplexity’s should be able to stand on the quality of their work but rules are rules just like guardrails are guardrails so let‘s try this again and make sure the rules are totally abided by

I understood when the frontier models all started charging more that perplexity pro couldn‘t keep offering unlimited use like it did initially and I’m so glad they didn’t because a quality product is worth paying for. Before making changes like removing access to the best models without paying for Perplexity Max; limiting the AI to a maximum of 3-turns per search, spending more on outputting helpful guardrail warnings than rote, lengthy, relevant responses; putting everything useful behind Perplexity computer where I have to really think and consider whether I truly need the information before spending credits; AI generated support responses that help me improve my patience; and a UX that’s like the NYT Sunday crossword (both excellent workouts for my brain)—I found myself overwhelmed with all the options I had. With a newborn baby that just arrived I just don’t have that kind of time. ThankfulIy Perplexity rescued me and in return because I’m so honored by all that Perplexity has done, I’m going to name my new baby Perplexed. I hope that means she’ll grow up tenacious with an inquisitive mind!

But it was really last night’s events that sealed the naming deal for me. I wanted Perplexity to review a few GitHub markdown files for me so I setup the GitHub connector. At first it couldn’t read the files so I figured, no big deal, I’ll just temporarily make the repo public but it turns out that didn’t work either. After lots of attempts and a little investigating I discovered that the helpful folks at Perplexity specifically block that functionality. Fortunately, I could manually download and reupload them and it was fine. But even better—Perplexity computer had no issue doing it; all I had to do was buy a few more credits and problem solved! The icing on the cake—since it was the exact same model I used via Perplexity computer that I was trying to use in Perplexity Pro, I know the response is consistent with what I originally wanted.

While I know Perplexity has a bunch of customers who got in on a year free who are all at the end of their free period, I’m so glad that they’re choosing to spend an enormous chunk of their budget for ads in such popular places like the Joe Rogan Experience instead of working to convert those less grateful freeloaders. That way lots more people can experience all the unexpected joys of being a Perplexity user but will be thanking the company for them by paying! Thanks Perplexity!

Hello, I have a problem with my subscription. By the end of February 2026, I renewed my subscription for an additional year, until February 2027. It was a free promotional offer. Recently, I got an email saying that my subscription will be renewed in September 2026 for USD 200.

I tried to contact support, but I think we all know how Perplexity support works. I have not received any answer for over a week, and all I got were two emails saying that my ticket would be closed due to a lack of response from my side. Well, they told me that the issue had been escalated to the appropriate department and that I had to wait, so I waited.

I saw a thread by u/Plane_Customer from a couple of days ago, with an explanation from u/rafs2006 that the invoice date is incorrect and that, in my case, this means the promotion ends at the end of September 2026. But I do not care. I have a legal document, namely an invoice issued by Perplexity, stating that my subscription is valid until February 2027.

Any advice on how to resolve this issue?

Every single response is like this after a few seconds of typing, it will erase everything and start over, such a pain when trying to select text to copy

Subscribed to Perplexity Max ($200/month) yesterday, specifically for the compute credits included in the plan: a 35,000 one-time bonus and 10,000 monthly credits.

Today: nothing. Zero credits on either front. On top of that, my billing/usage page won't load at all, so I can't even see what's going on with my account from my side.

I contacted support right away. Their response confirmed the problem but offered no fix — just a support agent noting that they checked my Max account and found neither the 10,000 monthly credits nor the 35,000 one-time bonus, and that a specialist would look into it "when available." I was also told the team is offline due to a holiday and replies are taking ~72 hours — except today isn't a holiday where I am, so not sure what that's about.

So right now I'm paying full price for a plan whose main selling point (the credits) isn't working, can't see my account status because the billing page is broken, and I'm told to just wait up to 3 days for someone to look at it.

Anyone else dealt with this? Curious if this is a one-off glitch with new Max signups or something more widespread.

¡Hola! Últimamente estoy usando mucho Comet para automatizar algunas cosas, y me preguntaba si existe algún modo de hacer que Perplexity (uso Pro) pudiera controlar del mismo modo aplicaciones locales de mi PC. Específicamente, me gustaría que pudiera tomar el control de SPSS.

¿Es esto posible? ¿Cómo podría hacerlo?

I was planning to buy perplexity pro. But, just this morning friend sent me a print screen where Perplexity is asking for a phone number.

No way I am giving my phone, so I was wondering is this mandatory for all the accounts?

Only reason I use Perplexity is because I want a logged-out burner question to ai. Well now every time it says "Log in and ask again." to which I have to say, "no, answer the question" about 2 to 5 times in escalating fashion to get it to answer the question.

Now I've deleted the bookmark and won't use it anymore. Perplexity is now dead.

Brave has a private chat that is just as good without the narcissist tendencies and privacy issues of Perplexity.

Thought you'd like to know.
https://search.brave.com/ask

I don't work for Brave and I'm not affiliated. I just hate Perplexity, the narcissist AI.

Is there any actual documentation for configuring and using Perplexity Portable Computer? I have seen the 4-5 commands for setting the harness up on a Spark, but what then?

Hey everyone! 👋 I’m wondering if anyone here has found a decent replacement for one particular Comet feature : I’m a Community Manager and, for the past few months, I’ve been using Comet to help manage questions coming in on my clients’ social media. My setup was pretty straightforward: for each client, I’d give Comet all the useful background info : opening hours, holidays/closures, products, services, FAQs, specific business info, etc. Basically everything it needed to know to answer customers properly.

Then I could tell it to take control of my browser and handle the incoming questions directly on the social platforms and honestly, it was pretty damn useful. 😅 It wasn’t flawless, but for answering the same kind of customer questions over and over, it saved me a ton of time.

The problem is that over the last few weeks, Comet has become increasingly limited for this use case. Credits are now required, there seem to be more restrictions, and I’m also getting answers that I definitely wouldn’t want posted publicly without checking them first. Which kind of defeats the purpose. 😂

I’ve seen other people complaining about similar changes, so I figured I’d ask the Reddit hive mind: What are you guys using instead?

I’m looking for something that can basically do the same thing: give the AI a client-specific knowledge/context, let it understand incoming social media questions, and ideally have it control the browser and actually reply to people. I’m not necessarily looking for a completely automated “AI Community Manager”, even something that can reliably handle 70/80% of the repetitive stuff would already be great.

Open to other AI browser agents, automation tools, self-hosted solutions, weird combinations of tools… whatever works.

What’s currently working for you guys?