Two products, one price list, and only one of them is what you searched for
Perplexity now sells two things. The answer engine, which is the search box with citations that made its name, and Perplexity Computer, an agentic sandbox that runs tasks. They share a plan list, and the bonus credits included with Pro and Max are for the sandbox rather than for search.
Establish which one you are buying before you read a price. A good deal of the writing about Perplexity is now about the sandbox, and if you are here to decide whether better search is worth twenty dollars, the credits in the plan comparison are not the thing you are paying for.
Three searches a day is the free tier, and that is the whole free tier
Perplexity publishes this one as a number, so quote it rather than calling the free plan limited: three Pro Searches a day and one Research query a month. No image generation, no file or app creation, no Comet Assistant.
That is a demonstration, not an allowance. It is enough to learn what the product does and not enough to use it for a week. Anyone who found Perplexity useful has already hit that wall, which is why the real decision here is about the paid tier rather than about the product.
Pro is $20 per month and Max is $200, or $166.67 a month billed annually. Verified students pay $10 through SheerID, which is the cheapest way into a paid assistant anywhere in this category if you qualify. Enterprise Pro starts at $40 a seat.
Perplexity tells enterprise what it is buying and does not tell you
Here is the inversion, and it is the most interesting thing about this pricing page.
The free plan states exact ceilings. Enterprise Pro states exact ceilings: 400 Pro Searches a week, 50 Research queries a month, 100 file uploads a week and 80 Comet Assistant queries a month.
Pro and Max, the two plans an individual actually buys, state nothing. The plan comparison describes their search, research and assistant limits as weekly and monthly limits for average or advanced use. That is not a number, and somebody paying two hundred dollars a month is entitled to one.
Most vendors in this category publish no consumer figures at all, so Perplexity is not unusual in outcome. It is unusual in that it clearly can produce the figures, and produces them only for the buyer with a procurement process.
The opt out that only works going forwards
On consumer plans your queries are used to train models unless you opt out in your account settings. Perplexity then states something most vendors leave unsaid: data already collected for training cannot be deleted or removed. The opt out applies prospectively only.
Credit where it is due for saying so. It also means the setting is worth finding on day one rather than on the day you think about it, because there is no undo.
Enterprise is the other way round. Queries are never used to train Perplexity's models, and Perplexity says it holds zero data retention and zero training agreements with the underlying model providers.
Two more things a careful buyer should note. A SOC 2 Type II report exists and is a checkable artifact. HIPAA is represented by a gap assessment rather than a completed attestation, which is a materially weaker claim, and no service level figure appears on any page we could open.
Where a general assistant beats it, and where nothing does
Perplexity scores 7.7, above one of the picks in our assistant comparison, and it is still outside the four. The reason is scope. This is an answer engine. It finds and attributes current information better than anything else here, and it is not built to carry a long piece of work from brief to finished thing.
At the same money, ChatGPT covers writing, analysis, code and images from one box. Claude includes a coding agent and a desktop worker at a lower annual price. Gemini bundles storage, YouTube Premium Lite, Home Premium and Health Premium into the same twenty dollars. Judged as a general assistant, Perplexity is expensive for what it does, and that shows up under how we rate as a value score well below its capability.
Judged as the thing it is, only Grok competes, and only on live search rather than on attribution. Every answer here arrives with its sources attached, which removes the verification step the others silently leave to you. If your day is finding out what is true right now, that is the whole argument and the twenty dollars is easy.
Who should pay, and who should stay free
Pay if research is the job: journalism, due diligence, competitive work, anything where an unsourced answer is worthless. Do not pay expecting it to replace a general assistant, because it will not, and the free tier is too small to discover that in.
If you are buying seats, the enterprise tier is the one that behaves like a business product. It states its ceilings, excludes your queries from training, and adds single sign on and SCIM. It is also the only place in this price list where you can plan capacity.
Prices, published ceilings and data terms on this page were checked against the vendor pricing page, help centre and developer documentation on .
