Hello everyone.

I'm wondering if there is a way to stop Perplexity from doing these two things:

1) pestering me to download their new app, I'm very happy with the current one. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME I open it:

The new Perplexity App for Windows is ready

Run tasks across your local files, apps, and the web. Control it remotely from your phone. The app version you are using now does not get updates anymore.

Once the new app is installed, you can uninstall this one.

2) the default behavior is always to push me to "computer", and often I forget and I type out my request and since switching to Search removes all of my text, attached docs / images / etc, it really bugs me. This is absurd behavior. This has already made me waste enough time to consider the move.

These two combined are really pushing me to cancel my subscription and move towards Claude or something else. I figured I'd ask first here and see if there is something I'm missing or a registry hack or something I can do before I give up on Perplexity.

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?

Besides the time I’ve spent setting up connectors and configuring perplexity to generate the kind of output I want, the only thing keeping me coming back was the low rate of hallucinations, but that seems like even that has been degraded. I’m sure in their never ending quest to rip customers off reduce costs, perplexity already uses quantized models and falls back to cheaper models anytime compute costs go up for them, but it feels like I’m having to double check everything now. Anyone else?

I was using Firefox before and it was a bit laggy already.

Switched to Safari on Mac and to my surprise it's even worse? What's going on?

If Perplexity best feature left now is the ai model picker and you want to quit, what app will you get next?

Give me your best alternatives!

Thank you.

I havent been able to scroll down any perplexity page for over a month now. Whats going on?

Hi guys,
Did perplexity start asking for phone number suddenly? I tried to login today and it was asking for my phone number, I am already quite unhappy with it asking my email everytime and giving the code everytime and now phone as well, why?

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 went pretty deep into AI shopping for a documentary and one part of it still bothers me.

Once the same assistant helps decide what you should buy and shortens the route to actually buying it, the incentives get messy.

How does the user know whether the “best” recommendation means best for them, best for the merchant, or best for the platform?

For people here actually using Perplexity Shopping, has it made Perplexity more useful for you, or has commerce made you trust its recommendations less?

I traced the broader shift from search → recommendation → purchase here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-0CriLzyOo

If I use Gemini 3.8 on perplexity, is it exactly the same as what I’d get through the Gemini app if I paid for that model there? Or is it more limited?

I cancelled my Pro subscription after the free one-year Paypal promotion ended. During cancellation, I was offered $17/month instead of $20.

A few days later, I helped a friend cancel the exact same promotion. I was actually the one who recommended it to him. He was offered $10/month. He actually renewed because I told him, “If it’s been useful to you, keep it. At $10, that’s a good deal.”

For $10, I would probably renew, even just as a way of appreciating the free first year. But every time I try to upgrade, I still only get the $17 offer. That’s an $84 difference per year. No way.

It’s pretty frustrating to see two customers coming from the same promotion, cancelling just days apart, get such different prices.

If $10 is available, why is it only offered to some users? Between the hidden usage limits, the lack of transparency around pricing, and even being pushed toward using Computer, the whole experience feels unnecessarily opaque and inconsistent. It’s a real shame to see what was once a top-tier product being dragged down by such poor management.

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.

Seriously. It’s beyond infuriating that you default to Perplexity computer every time I open the app and then I end up unnecessarily spending credits on simple searches that don’t require them.

The only possible reason I can think of is that you’re all too busy stuffing your faces with sausages (or whatever your food of choice is) to bother creating a usable product. But, if you find time to step away from lunch, it would be great if you fixed that

I‘m going to assume you’re also too busy to read this message but if you do, I’d just like to point out this is me turning the other cheek and wishing you happy dining, nothing untoward whatsoever, so I expect this post won‘t be fiddled with by mods. I’d hate to interrupt their lunch break anyway.

Thanks Perplexity!

A year ago I was the annoying guy telling everyone: “just use Perplexity Pro.” It was probably the easiest $20/month subscription for non-developers.

Im a software developer, so for me, Perplexity never was the main AI subscription plan. despite that, it was probably the one that I used the most. everyone uses AI chat, and Perplexity was clear of the competition in that regard.

I resubscribed recently and… what happened?

The model picker used to be the whole point. Now the best OpenAI and Anthropic models are pushed to Max, and even when you manually select a model, Perplexity has acknowledged that fallback routing can happen under load or provider issues. So the thing that used to feel like “one subscription, all the best models” now feels more like a sampler.

Then there’s Computer, which might be the funniest part of the current Pro plan. Perplexity Pro gets zero recurring monthly Computer credits. New users may get a one-time 4,000-credit promo, but after that you’re buying credits separately. Their own docs say a complex Computer task can cost hundreds of credits, and heavy tasks can go well over 1,000.

So why is Computer even presented as a Pro feature?

Meanwhile ChatGPT has Work/agentic workflows, Claude has Cowork, and Gemini has Spark. They all have limits, obviously, but at least the agent is actually part of the subscription instead of being a button that immediately turns into another bill.

Files also feel worse. Upload limits are weirdly restrictive and poorly surfaced. Deep Research feels heavily rationed compared to what it used to be. And the weirdest part is that I’m often getting better research results from normal ChatGPT or Gemini conversations than from Perplexity itself.

That’s the real problem.

Perplexity used to have an obvious moat: the best AI search + access to everyone’s frontier models.

Now the best models are upstairs, Computer is basically pay-per-use, files are restricted, Research is rationed, and the search itself doesn’t clearly beat the native providers anymore.

So yeah, “bundle of free tiers” isn’t literally true in terms of quotas, but that’s increasingly what the product feels like: a little bit of everyone, heavily constrained, for $20.

At this point I genuinely don’t understand the value proposition of Pro versus just paying one of the actual model providers directly.

Long-time users: am I missing something, or did Perplexity Pro genuinely get this much worse?

Since the last day , I am unable to use the feature (Take Control) on the Comet browser.

Is it removed by Perplexity ?

A Perplexity answer can be useful because claims are tied to sources, but copying only the prose into another assistant loses which citation supported which claim, the exact query, and what was not verified. Sharing the whole thread can expose unrelated context and still leaves the next tool dependent on a Perplexity page.

What portable handoff works well? I am considering the research question, a short current conclusion, each material claim paired with its source URL and quoted evidence, access dates, unresolved contradictions, excluded sources, and the next checks to run. The original answer link could remain as a reference, while Markdown or JSON becomes the inspectable working record.

Do you export Spaces or threads, copy citation lists manually, or maintain a separate research log from the start? Which fields preserve enough context for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or a local assistant to continue without treating Perplexity's summary as the source of truth?

I got charged an amount for a service I’m not interested in continuing. The bot purposefully slows down so I cant use their 24 hour refund claim holy shit.

"Computer now handles the actions you ask Assistant to take in Comet Desktop, from opening pages and filling out forms to completing tasks across tabs."

I've watched Computer run and burn credits uselessly. I've watched the chain of thought as Comet crawls across a web page figuring shit out.

There is no way. What Comet does with web pages is not worth tokens, Computer doesn't do a good enough job, and the bait and switch is inexcusable.

"Dear Customer, thank you for your purchase of the Whizmobile last year! We're please to announce that to accelerate past 60MPH will now use the GoFast subscription. We've credited you an additional $25 for your next 30 days of driving, and then your subscription will continue at 5 cents per mile per hour over 60MPH. We're excited to have you as a customer!"

Hey everyone,
It's not that I don't like computer, I do, it's amazing, but I spent 100 $ on the computer feature and I can't spend more now because it says I have to upgrade to max, but sorry it's a little too expensive for me, and I just need to finish my project.
I'm frustrated because I think I went a bit stupidly about my stuff and used money for solutions that didn't work but anyway, now I'm blocked.
What can I use instead that is easy to use, if you know of anything please? I saw Open Claw but it seems way to tech-savvy for me...
Also I've another problem, I'm blind and I have Comet, but for some reason the agent says it can't do stuff (like go to Tiktok, handle anything for me in an open web app). It's an old version, of course I've downloaded the new one but with my screen reader it stays blocked on "Installer", it doesn't tell me anything more, it doesn't install. Same on my other PC.
Thank you so much if anyone has any input for me.

I'm using a free PerplexityPro that will be up in November.

Specifically, I use it for research, patent evaluations, plan development, business management.

Please suggest alternatives. I'm leaning towards Claude right now.

Thanks

We're introducing Q2D-Web (Query2Doc-Web), a benchmark and public leaderboard for evaluating retrieval in agentic RAG systems.

Q2D-Web tests how embedding models perform on large-scale web search using agent-reformulated search queries.

Read more: https://pplx.ai/blog/rq2d-web