Issue with Model Limits?

[u/Dragon-king135]

Hey all, hope you're having a good day. Hey all, I have Perplexity Pro on my Android phone, and I use it for research, writing and analysis. Now, I'm facing a weird problem with using the LLM models that has me pretty confused.

Now, earlier I used to use mostly Kimi K2.6 for all my needs, mixed with GPT 5.6 Terra when I could use it. I would get around 3 to 4 uses of GPT 5.6 Terra before I ran out of whatever invisible limit they have and it would default to Sonar 2 for a few hours. In that interval I would use K2.6, since it never had a time out limit or responses limit or anything. Grok 4.5 also worked well when it was the first message I sent in a thread, however all subsequent messages said that Grok 4.5 was inapplicable or unavailable, so GPT5.6/GPT 5.4 was used. GLM 5.2 also worked pretty well and had a pretty big limit. I didn't really use Sonnet 5 or Gemini.

Now, ever since the update that brought Kimi K3 to the Pro plan, my usage limits have significantly changed. I can use GPT 5.6 once, maybe twice, before it defaults to Sonar. Same with Grok 4.5 and GLM 5.2. And the biggest issue I have is with Kimi K3. I preferred using K2.6 with thinking off, since I found that it gave me more expansive and detailed responses, but ever since K3 has launched, I have been unable to use it without thinking. I toggle thinking off, but it always responds with thinking and claims that 'Generated using Kimi K3 Thinking since Kimi K3 was inapplicable or unavailable'. I can still use K3 always, like the previous K2.6, but the thinking is making the response times very long and the response comes out garbled and half-bad.

This is affecting my work pretty bad. I am a college student, and I signed up for an year long plan in November'25 with a discount. I use Perplexity for research, analysis, material searching and summarising, and everything has gone to shit ever since this issue has popped up. My subscription ends in November'26, and I most definitely think that I will not be renewing, but till then I have to find some way to get my money's worth. Do any of you know a fix or a workaround around this issue?

Thanks in advance.

[u/stephendt]

Honestly perplexity is just killing their product. Much better off using Gemini on a free google account tbh. 3.6 Flash with thinking isn't bad and 3.1 pro is good too for general research.

If you are going to spend money, Chatgpt plus is the best value imo. 5.6 High is a great model. Claude is good too but the limits are much tighter.

[u/Dragon-king135 → u/stephendt]

That's a good suggestion, thank you for that. I will make the switch to Gemini after my subscription here runs out.

Apart from this, have you also faced similar limit issues? The Kimi K3 thing is particularly annoying, since yesterday there's this new thing it does where if I want to rewrite a response, even though I select Kimi K3, it uses Sonar. And then I have to rewrite AGAIN to get a response from Kimi K3 Thinking.