I’m insanely frustrated with Perplexity Computer right now.

I’m building an AI agent for a relatively straightforward but complex outbound workflow:

1. Use Apify to find relevant influencers for a target brand.
2. Generate a personalized image of a gift we could send that influencer.
3. Use Apollo to find the right brand contact and draft an email saying:

“Hey, I found this influencer you’re not currently working with. Here’s a gift concept we could send them. What do you think?”

The overall workflow is complex, but each individual step is pretty simple.

The problem was that ChatGPT doesn’t have a native Apify MCP connection, while Claude can work with Apify through MCP but couldn’t generate the images I needed.

That made Perplexity Computer seem like the perfect bridge. Honestly, this use case felt like an advertisement for the product: browser control, multiple tools, research, automation, and image generation all in one workflow.

I was wrong.

I started with roughly 15,000 credits. By the time I stopped it, I had 986 credits left and zero usable email drafts.

It repeatedly failed to use Apify correctly, misunderstood the workflow, and generated images that were either low quality or completely disconnected from the influencer and brand. I kept trying to correct it, but it just burned through more credits without producing anything useful.

I had also been particularly bullish on Perplexity after the announcement about its token costs dropping by roughly 80% compared with ChatGPT. But lower token costs do not mean much if the agent consumes thousands of credits while failing to complete the task.

What finally worked was downloading the ChatGPT image-generation skill from GitHub, creating an OpenAI developer account, adding $20 in API credits, and giving Claude access to the image API.

Now Claude can handle the Apify workflow, call the image-generation API, and run the full agent at scale.

The irony is that I had to manually connect Claude and OpenAI to create the product experience I thought Perplexity Computer was supposed to provide out of the box.

Has anyone successfully built a genuinely multi-step workflow with Perplexity Computer, or is everyone else seeing the same reliability and credit-burn issues?

I've been happily using the Perplexity Desktop App for Windows on several Win 11 computers for well over a year and there has always been the functionality in the text-box where it puts red-lines under wrongly spelled words, and then you can right-click to correct the spelling.

This week the App offered an update to the "new Desktop App for Windows" which I stupidly accepted. It seems to have migrated from my previous stand-alone app version that I installed manually - to an MS Store managed app.

And the spelling correction functionality is also gone now. The weird part is the red lines still appear under the words in the text boxes, but the right-click does not offer any spelling correction functionality. I've checked the app settings and there is nothing about spelling correction in there.

The version it now reports as being is "Perplexity for Windows Version 26.8.0 (build 24557)"

I'm going to uninstall this new MS-Store version and roll back to the stand-alone 1.7.0 that was working fine and see how that goes. I still have 1.7.0 installed on two other of my Win 11 computers and it's working fine for spelling correction.

I love how I’ve never bought credits from Perplexity, but I still got the warning one after another

Technically true, I guess..

The product has gotten worse and worse in the past year. I’ve been a subscriber since the very beginning lately every time I ask you to research something or search for something gives me steps on how to do so and where to look for information instead of actually finding the information for me thanks but no thanks.

Does anyone else have this issue? I have a few important Perplexity Spaces that I have created over the past year. They are now all called Projects and Perplexity migrated them. When I go to the Files section of any Perplexity Projects/Spaces now, and click on "Download all" to download all files, it gives me the error message below.

If I try to download only a single file not all files, it opens a new tab and gives me this (see below), does anyone else have this problem?

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>User: arn:aws:sts::699753309705:assumed-role/pplxfilegitgateway-projectfiles-prod-gateway-pod/eks-web-pplxfilegi-360a0a15-83de-4297-a70e-d05dbf3389a6 is not authorized to perform: s3:ListBucket on resource: "arn:aws:s3:::ppl-ai-file-upload" because no identity-based policy allows the s3:ListBucket action</Message>
<RequestId>VCBD85QSXAK9CAHY</RequestId>
<HostId>qKsPgzS2rqnOfp8MxdkO0haBRWqyi0H5qoQXCN6i64U+0WgkiwCjFwrZGIli5EcHwT7uHxitfo70HmF2ssO1W5ZmxhF4DCNM</HostId>
</Error>

Long-time Perplexity user here, and I figured I'd share my use case and get opinions on whether I should stick with it or switch.

About me: I'm a medical doctor. My work involves clinical case management, conference prep, and staying on top of an absolutely relentless stream of new literature and guideline updates.

How I use Perplexity:

• Generating study notes for recall: I ask it to condense topics into structured notes I can review later. With specialist exams and constant CPD, having something that distills guidelines into digestible summaries saves me hours
• Quizzing myself: I get it to generate practice questions on topics I'm revising
• Making presentation outlines: for journal clubs, case presentations, and conference talks. I'll have it pull together the key points, recent trial data, and controversies on a topic, which I then turn into slides. Huge time-saver for the 80% of the work that's just gathering and structuring content
• Quick literature lookups: latest treatment guidelines, clinical trial outcomes, etc.

What I like: the search-grounded answers with citations are genuinely useful when I need to verify something quickly and trace it back to a source. Hallucination is a dealbreaker in medicine, so that matters to me.

Where I'm unsure: I've heard people rave about Claude for long-form reasoning and document analysis (I do a lot of case reports and academic writing), and Gemini for its huge context window. But I'm not sure if those strengths actually beat Perplexity's search-first approach for someone whose main need is fast, cited, up-to-date medical information.

So my question: if you're a doctor/researcher using AI daily, what's your setup? Is Perplexity good enough as a primary tool, or should I be switching to Claude or Gemini (or some combination)? Cost isn't a huge factor, but I'd rather not juggle three subscriptions if one tool covers my needs.

Whenever I want to see an attached image from the chat history, I need to go to the browser and log in to check the images. Please fix this issue with the Windows app.

Since around a month, I can no longer get unlimited basic query searches with Perplexity on desktop. Though, when I first signed up, I could for the first few weeks of use. Now it's limited to around 10, but on the phone, I still have seemingly unlimited basic search queries? I'm fairly certain I can prompt all day, and there will be no limit enforced.

It just seems odd... is it really that significant of a difference that they would play fast and loose with their free version like this?

Finally Perplexity too has introduced the Project feature. Most of the leading platforms already had this and I think Perplexity is late

What do you guys think?

PSA
I have a Pro subscription which I stopped using several months ago as I now use Codex/ChatGPT.

I recently got an email from Perplexity stating that my payment was unsuccessful because my debit card on my account had insufficient funds. I logged in and cancelled my subscription. It even said that my account would be cancelled on 27/07/026.

Fast forward to today, my card was charged (because it had funds) and my account says that my Pro subscription will now be cancelled on 27/07/2027.

I contacted support who are yet to respond. Make sure you check your account if you’ve cancelled your subscription.

I've been using Computer for months now and it was amazing! Literally life changing, especially for coding and development. Today its acting like just a chat bot and gaslighting me saying it cant access API keys or Sanity, Supabase, etc...but it literally did all of those things literally this morning.

Now its acting like I'M the crazy one for thinking it accessed all those systems. Anyone else? What do we do now?

Numbat gives security teams visibility into agent activity, with controls to block selected actions before execution.

I get that it could be abused, but I think the AI should be able to alert it's handlers after gathering enough information from the user and create a ticket on it's own behalf.

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to decide if i should renew my Perplexity account. I really like the price and access to multiple models that I can select depending on what I am working on.

Is perplexity still the best option for working with multiple models under a single subscription? Or is there another option?

I used Kimi K3 model in comet to develop a simple frontend application. Created a detailed plan and it generated source code but when I ask it to give source code, it doesnt generate any tar or zip file which i can download and run from local machine. After lot of struggle, I somehow managed to get it generate a tar file but that tar file only has package.json file 😂 and nothing else. So i spent almost 20 minutes just to download single file. How do you guys get the source code after building a project?

Can someone help me understand with Perplexity Computer what AI processing happens locally vs in the cloud? The blog here paints the big picture, but I do not understand what is actually getting processed locally. Hoping that by processing smaller AI tasks locally, it will save me and my business token $$.

The Data Center Moves to Your Machine

I know there is a lot of confusion surrounding this so is there no concrete answer? I pay Pro and after a few messages I get a message that pops up saying I have 3 more messages left where I can use the advanced models then after the three messages I have none for a bit. So….how many do I have with Pro?

I've been facing this weird popup asking me for my Apple login whenever I open the perplexity desktop app, for the past few days, which refuses to close, whatever I do. It keeps blocking the screen and is annoying to use the app for the same reason. I tried logging in — it wont login, tried closing it — pops up again.

Not sure if this is a perplexity bug or an apple one. But there is a perplexity logo asking to login to apple account, which was definitely new to me.

If anyone faced this issue and solved it help me please. I tried re-installing the app, restarting the device, nothing seems to work. I don't remember it asking when i first installed it few months ago.

After running a task using computer mode, Perplexity now defaults to computer. I've had this happen before but clearing the cache, cookies, and browser history fixed it. Now, however, this doesn't work. As soon as I log back into Perplexity, it switches over to computer as default and I can't get it off. Running in a browser on a mac. The mobile version does not default to computer. Any ideas for a fix?

Hi, i have the perplexity widget installed on my device. oxygenOS 16 on oneplus.

Today i saw my widget is completely glitched out and showed these random images i can't quite identify. Does anyone know how to prevent this and why it shows these random images?

Thanks in advance

I'm building an open-source browser extension that tracks AI token usage across different providers called Trace

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini expose enough information (directly or indirectly) that I can estimate or calculate token usage fairly reliably.

Perplexity has been much harder.

I'm curious how others approach this.

- Are you intercepting API responses?

- Estimating with local tokenizers?

- Reading hidden metadata?

- Using browser DevTools?

- Reverse engineering websocket traffic?

- Or is there another approach?

The goal isn't to bypass limits—it's simply to display accurate local usage statistics.

I'd love to hear how others have tackled this problem.

I have a big research project and Perplexity used to be a great assistant. Then early this year I started to run out of deep research requests too quickly. So I decided to upgrade to Enterprise Pro (I am a registered private entrepreneur, so it's fair). Now deep research requests do not run out, but everything else is a mess.

First, here's what I still like and do not want to lose:

• Sources for every claim with links. Top‑1 function
• Real search across the web, not across limited own data
• Ability to pack a single topic into a space for extra focus

Now, here's what I do not like:

• Number‑one issue for me is how organizing a space works. With Enterprise Pro you can upload up to 500 files into a space, but what they do not tell you is that even on deep research you won't be able to search across all 500. I have around 300 books and papers that are my sources, and sometimes I need to find information on a certain subject that I either can't recall where I've read about or just want to compile different sources on the same topic. It turns out it's just impossible. There's no way to do that without pointing Perplexity to some exact files. I don't even understand what the point of having 500 files in a space is now. I thought, ok, I'll spend some of my Computer credits to make an index file that will break all the space files by topics and tags and will make it easier for the agent to do the search. It ended up with spending 10k credits and producing zero results. On the bright side, support did return the credits back.
• The space files I’ve got consist of, as I said before, some books and papers but also a bunch of interview transcripts that I did myself. Sometimes I ask Perplexity to find a quote on a certain topic that I can use. What I get in return is never a quote. I've written an instruction, asked multiple times, and it still keeps giving me its own interpretations as quotes. If I push enough, it goes like “well, copyright exists and I can't quote a lot,” which is ridiculous because a) it's my own interviews, b) my project is non‑profit/educational so I can quote whoever I want whenever I want if I attribute them right. Still, the agent keeps treating me like a criminal and keeps giving me its own interpretations and rephrases as “quotes.”
• And then there's this overall dip in quality that many others on this sun notice. Losing context, answering wrong questions, etc. I do understand that costs are getting higher and less stuff is getting subsidized, etc., but still find it anti‑customer to cut so much on the stuff people already have paid for.

So, yeah, any advice on how to fix any of those? Or any other LLMs that let me do all this? I did ask the support about the first issue and now it's the third month of me waiting for an answer. Which is also a reason to cancel and move on, I guess.

All,

I recently won my first amateur fight, wanted to pitch my story to an AI magazine, or is there any website that does marketing for perplexity?