I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly.

Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see my results appear in a second, but they’re garbage. The links and references it gives frequently don’t match the text right next to them. It feels like someone had a KPI to make responses as fast as possible and they optimized for that above all else.

They added a “Computer” option that’s supposed to do research for you. Half the time I can’t get it to trigger through the UI. Pressing the submit button doesn’t work. When I can get it to trigger, most of those sessions will work for a while and then just stop before an answer comes back.

The only reason I keep using it is to keep observing a company that has been heavily marketed and hyped, which should have had a market leading position for something. Even non-technical people I know who listen to Joe Rogan (where Perlexity is advertising heavily, I’m told) are asking me about it.

Now there are reports of people being billed at the end of their trial period without warning, despite them saying that they will warn before this happens. There are some alarmingly bad customer support screenshots where the customer support agent (AI? Probably) acknowledges that they didn’t send the email they promised but refuse to help anyway. It takes escalating it on Twitter to get it corrected.

If I want to do actual research or AI assisted web searching I have Claude or ChatGPT do it. The results are so much higher quality and it does exactly what I ask. It may take 45 seconds instead of the instant response from Perplexity but I save time overall because the response and links are more likely to be correct

I paid for perplexity pro for 3 years. I genuinely enjoyed using it and felt it was better overall than ChatGPT etc due to the way it showed sources etc. I liked being able to use different models depending on what I was looking for, and the deep research was helpful.

I think they probably damaged themselves by going for a land grab of user base through freebies. It meant the users weren’t ever going to convert to paid customers, so it was more to show investors that they had a user base. But, with an increased base of users who weren’t paying, it then meant they needed to find either new revenue streams or cheaper ways to provide the service. Unfortunately, it seems they went with the new revenue streams whilst also decreasing the functions paying members were able to access (something I find quite abhorrent- I paid a service level, but then they change what I receive mid-subscription). And then computer - rammed down my throat. One reason I pay for pro is to stop the nagging noise of paid tiers. And instead, they actually created a way of logging in and continually seeing gated functions.

So, after paying them upwards of $400-$500 and being a loyal customer, I walked.

Perplexity really fell off for me, especially the free version. Their syntax highlighting stopped working, and even the fonts seemed messed up. You could tell they were mixing and matching whatever the cheapest model was because the sources would be messed up and printed as plane text <grok source 1 http:// ... />

I guess it makes sense though, unless you've got the lowest pricing on your own model how can you compete.

If they had some sort of tier that was like $5 to $10 and the main thing it had on it was their custom model for research, no other model, I might re-subscribe, but they were definitely burning way too much compute trying to give it away in the hopes others kept their subscription. I was using it to trim down on my direct Claude Compute usage since they ran me unmetered for a while.

I would draft a development plan with Claude on there, then feed it to Claude Code. This isn't sustainable, but given that I had x number of months pre-paid for, I just used it.

I’ve personally found that Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher too to match its seeming over-responsiveness. Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.

I was one of the people that used the free Pro tier for a year and it is still my go to app when I want to quickly check something and have some sources linked, but I agree that over that year the quality of linked sources dropped significantly. But at least I got noticed when my trial period was near the end, so they either learned, or I was lucky.