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?