Perplexity Pricing 2026: Every Plan, API Cost, and Fees Explained

Perplexity pricing in 2026 spans six core SKUs: Free at $0, Pro at $20/month ($200/year), Max at $200/month ($2,000/year), Education Pro at $10/month for verified students, Enterprise Pro at $40/seat/month, and Enterprise Max at $325/seat/month. Developers pay separately: the Agent API bills models at their providers’ rates plus small tool fees, and the Search API costs $5 per 1,000 requests, or $1 on Fast Search.

This guide covers every part of Perplexity pricing you’ll actually pay for: the consumer plans and their real usage limits, Computer credits, the API rate card, Comet and Comet Plus, plus the Education and Enterprise tiers. Every number was pulled from Perplexity’s plan comparison, its API docs and its pricing pages on 15 October 2026, then we ran the math on what each plan really costs.

The Key Takeaways

• Perplexity Free is permanent and includes 3 Pro Searches a day and 1 Deep Research query a month, with citations but no model choice.
• Perplexity Pro is $20/month or $200/year (≈ $16.67/month) and swaps the daily cap for weekly Pro Search limits and monthly Deep Research limits. It is not unlimited.
• Perplexity Max sits at $200/month or $2,000/year, with the highest limits, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and 10,000 Computer credits a month.
• Comet browser has been free since October 2025 on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. Comet Plus launched at $5/month, but its page was offline when we checked on 15 October 2026.
• Sonar Chat Completions is now the Agent API, which bills models at provider rates plus tool fees from $0.0005 a call. The Search API is $5 per 1,000 requests, or $1 on Fast Search.

Perplexity Plans 2026 (Free, Pro at $20, Max at $200, Education Pro at $10, Enterprise Pro at $40, Enterprise Max at $325)

Perplexity has six paid surfaces in 2026: a free tier, three consumer subscriptions (Pro, Max, Education Pro), two Enterprise tiers (Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max), plus the developer-facing API. Most readers want the consumer ladder, so here it is at a glance. If you only care about the $0 option, our full guide on whether Perplexity AI is free breaks down exactly what the free tier includes.

Pro and Max are the two plans most individuals pick. Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max are seat-based and require teams to talk to Perplexity sales for billing and discounts. The full plan matrix lives on the Perplexity pricing page.

Perplexity Free at $0/month

Yes. The Perplexity Free plan has no expiration and lets you use the answer engine across web, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. You get practically unlimited basic searches with source citations, basic file uploads, and Perplexity’s automatic model choice, called Best.

The catch is the limit on Pro Search, which is the multi-step, source-rich version of a query. Perplexity’s plan comparison gives Free users 3 Pro Searches a day and 1 Deep Research query a month, with no Create files and apps (the feature formerly called Labs), no Comet Assistant agent tasks and no model picker. Once you hit the cap you’re rolled back to a basic search until it resets. For most casual users this is fine. Anyone who runs more than a handful of serious research questions a day will outgrow it within a week.

Perplexity Pro at $20/month

Perplexity Pro is $20/month billed monthly, or $200/year (≈ $16.67/month) on the annual plan. That’s a 17% effective discount for paying yearly.

Pro replaces the free daily cap with weekly limits on Pro Search and monthly limits on Deep Research, which Perplexity sizes for “average use”. Neither is unlimited. You also get the premium model picker, which routes a question to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Moonshot, Z.ai and NVIDIA inside the same answer engine. Perplexity publishes that roster, dated 4 September 2026: Pro gets Sonar 2, GPT-5.6 Terra, Gemini 3.7 Flash, Claude Sonnet 5, Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, Grok 4.6 and Nemotron 3 Ultra, while GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5 are held for Max. Perplexity calls the picker in the app the source of truth for your own account, so check it before you count on a specific model. The plan adds a monthly allowance of Create files and apps queries for spreadsheets, dashboards and mini-apps, image and limited video generation, and up to 50 file uploads per project. Paid Pro plans also include a weekly amount of Perplexity Computer usage, but no monthly credits.

Pro is the sweet spot for most knowledge workers, students, journalists and casual researchers. It costs the same as ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro, so the only question is which answer engine you trust most.

Perplexity Max at $200/month

Perplexity Max costs $200/month or $2,000/year, billed monthly only or annual via the web app. The annual plan saves you $400 compared to paying month-to-month.

Max stacks several big upgrades on top of Pro. Create files and apps gets Perplexity’s highest limits for dashboards, spreadsheets, presentations and web apps, instead of Pro’s monthly allowance. Perplexity Computer, an agentic AI system that carries long multi-step work forward for you, comes with 10,000 credits per month at 100 credits to the dollar, plus a default $200 monthly spending cap you can raise to $5,000, according to Perplexity’s credits guide. Max also adds Model Council, which puts the same question to several models at once, Brain, a research-preview memory that builds a working model of your projects inside Computer, and Max Assistant in Comet. It is also the only consumer plan whose model picker includes Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

Max is the right pick if you run agentic workflows daily, generate research reports at scale, or push Create files and apps hard for client-facing dashboards. As TechCrunch reported when the tier launched in July 2025, Max was built specifically for power users who already pay $200 elsewhere for ChatGPT Pro or Claude Max.

Perplexity Education Pro at $10/month

Education Pro is $10/month for verified university students, educators and faculty, which is exactly 50% off standard Pro. Verification runs through SheerID using your `.edu` email or institutional ID. If you do not qualify for Education Pro, our guide to AI deals and bundle alternatives covers other ways to pay less.

Education Pro includes everything in regular Pro: the same weekly Pro Search and monthly Deep Research limits, the premium model picker and Perplexity Computer, plus Learn Mode. The headline 12-month free Pro promotion that ran through 2025 is now closed, so verified students get the discount, not a free year. Our guide to free or cheap Perplexity Pro tracks the student offers that are still live.

Perplexity Enterprise Pro at $40/seat/month

Enterprise Pro is $40 per seat per month (or $400 per seat per year, a 17% annual discount). Pricing is per-seat with no published seat minimum.

Enterprise Pro stacks team and security features on top of consumer Pro. Perplexity’s plan comparison gives each seat 400 Pro Searches a week, 50 Research queries a month, 50 Create files and apps queries a month, 80 Comet Assistant tasks a month and 100 file uploads a week, plus 500 Computer credits a month. Teams can work together in shared Spaces, admins get SSO and role-based access, and Perplexity says Enterprise data is never used for model training. Centralized billing and admin tooling round out the package.

Perplexity Enterprise Max at $325/seat/month

Enterprise Max is $325 per seat per month (or $3,250 per seat per year, shown as $271 a month billed annually). It raises the per-seat limits to 4,000 Pro Searches a week, 500 Research queries and 500 Create files and apps queries a month and 800 Comet Assistant tasks, plus 15,000 Computer credits a month and 15 eight-second videos a month. Volume discounts apply for teams of 250+ seats, schools, government and not-for-profit accounts. Talk to Perplexity sales for custom contracts.

Perplexity API Pricing: Agent API, Search API and Sonar

The Perplexity API is how you get Perplexity’s web-grounded answers into your own product without sending users to perplexity.ai. In 2026 that mainly means the Agent API, which bills each model at its provider’s published token rates with no per-request fee, plus a small fee for every tool call the model makes, such as a web search.

Check one thing before you build. Perplexity turned Sonar Chat Completions into the Agent API in July 2026, according to its API changelog, and supported Sonar until 27 September 2026. Its pricing page no longer lists Sonar rates (checked 15 October 2026), so treat the table below as Sonar’s final published rate card and put anything new on the Agent API. The Agent API bills third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Z.AI, Moonshot AI and NVIDIA at provider rates with no markup.

Source: Sonar rate card in Perplexity’s API docs, last published before the September 2026 cutoff; current rates at docs.perplexity.ai.

On those final Sonar rates, the request fee scaled with context level. Sonar low-context calls cost $5/1,000 requests and high-context calls $12/1,000, while Sonar Pro ran $6 to $14/1,000 across the same scale. Deep Research added $2 per million citation tokens and $3 per million reasoning tokens on top of the $8 output rate, so a single deep research call could run several cents end-to-end.

The rest of the rate card is current. The Search API is a raw web search endpoint that returns results without LLM rewriting at $5 per 1,000 requests, or $1 per 1,000 on Fast Search, billed per successful request rather than per query inside it. On the Agent API, a standard web_search call costs $0.0025 and a Fast Search call $0.001, image_search is $0.0025 per successful call, and fetch_url costs $0.0005. people_search and finance_search are $0.005 each, and a code sandbox session is $0.03 per 20-minute billing window. Perplexity also sells embeddings from $0.004 per million tokens and a Decisions API at $0.02 per million input tokens.

Worked Example: An Agent API Answer With Web Search

Perplexity’s own docs price a typical Agent API call: GPT-5.6 Terra with 500 input tokens, 200 output tokens and one standard web search comes to about $0.0059. Scale that to a customer support bot answering 10,000 questions a month and the bill looks like this.

That’s a baseline. Switch the search to Fast Search at $0.001 a call and the search line drops from $25 to $10. A heavier model or longer answers move the token lines instead. The headline rule is the same as with every modern AI API: tool fees stack with token fees, so model your traffic before you flip the switch.

Do Pro Plans Still Include API Credits?

Do not count on them. Older guides, ours included, said Pro came with $5 a month of Sonar API credits. Perplexity’s current Pro and Max help pages no longer list that perk, and its API billing page sells credits pay-as-you-go, with no subscription required. API credits are also separate from the Computer credits that come with Max.

How Much Does Perplexity Comet Cost?

Comet, Perplexity’s AI browser, is free. It launched on July 9, 2025 for Windows and macOS, gated behind the $200/month Max plan and a waitlist that ran into the millions. Perplexity dropped the paywall on October 2, 2025 and released Comet worldwide at no cost. The free mobile apps followed, Android on November 20, 2025 and iOS on March 18, 2026.

The free Comet gives you Perplexity search beside your tabs and the usual browser features, and you can set Comet as your default browser on iOS or Mac with a few taps. There’s no Comet account fee. The agent is the paid part: Perplexity’s plan comparison lists no Comet Assistant queries on the free plan, monthly limits on Pro, and Max Assistant on Max.

What is Comet Plus?

Comet Plus is the add-on Perplexity launched in August 2025 at $5/month for premium publisher content inside Comet’s AI answers, included with Pro and Max. One caution: Perplexity’s Comet Plus page returned a “page not found” error when we checked on 15 October 2026, so confirm the offer in your account before you pay for it.

Launch partners include Conde Nast (Wired, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest), CNN, Fortune, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, plus Le Monde and Le Figaro in France. Per Perplexity’s announcement, 80% of Comet Plus revenue is shared with participating publishers based on human visits, search citations and agent actions, which is a different revenue model than typical content licensing.

Pro and Max subscribers never had to pay for Comet Plus separately, since it was bundled. If you only use Comet for free, check that the add-on is still on sale before subscribing. For a head-to-head with OpenAI’s competing browser, see our ChatGPT Atlas vs Perplexity Comet breakdown.

Perplexity Pricing vs ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini

The four major answer engines all converge on the same headline tier prices, with one or two outliers above. Here’s how Perplexity stacks up against the rest.

A few practical takeaways. Perplexity Pro at $20/mo is priced exactly like every other answer engine’s standard tier, so the headline is identical. The differentiator is the answer engine itself, which is search-grounded and citation-first by default. Perplexity Max at $200 is the same price as ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max 20x, but Perplexity Max throws in 10,000 Computer credits a month for an agentic feature the others wrap into separate products. For a deeper dive on how the search engines compare on quality, see our AI search and deep research comparison, or our full AI pricing comparison for the side-by-side across every major AI tool including Grok and DeepSeek.

On the API side, Perplexity no longer competes on its own model’s price. The Agent API resells models such as GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Opus 5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro at their providers’ rates, so what you pay Perplexity for is the tool layer: $0.0025 per standard web search, or $0.001 on Fast Search. That makes it a search-and-tools layer on top of the model you already like, not a cheaper model.

How to Cut Your Perplexity Bill

A few moves can shave 30 to 70 percent off your Perplexity spend depending on plan and usage.

1. Switch to annual billing. Pro saves $40/year. Max saves $400/year. Enterprise Pro saves $80/seat/year.
2. Verify Education Pro if you qualify. Students and educators pay $10/mo instead of $20/mo, exactly 50% off.
3. Use Free for casual research, Pro only when you regularly exceed 3 Pro Searches a day. Most readers don’t need a paid plan.
4. Use Fast Search for high-volume API jobs. Search API requests drop from $5 to $1 per 1,000, and Agent API web searches from $2.50 to $1 per 1,000.
5. Pick the model per job on the Agent API. The tool fee is fixed, so the model’s token rate decides most of the bill.
6. Watch your Computer credits on Max. Max includes 10,000 a month, and the default $200 spending cap stops a runaway task from billing you more.

A Cheaper Alternative: One Subscription, All the Models

Here’s the honest tradeoff with Perplexity pricing. If you also want ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek in your daily AI rotation, you’d stack Perplexity Pro at $20, ChatGPT Plus at $20, Claude Pro at $20, Google AI Pro at $19.99, Grok Premium at $30, and DeepSeek paid tiers. That’s roughly $100 per month just to keep accounts open across the major answer engines.

Fello AI turns that stack into one subscription instead of five: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek in a single Mac, iPhone and iPad app, from $11.99 a month in most countries (checked 15 October 2026). Ask the same prompt, switch models, and skip the separate logins. It’s not a replacement for Perplexity Pro if you live in Pro Search and Comet, but for everyday chat plus side-by-side model comparisons, the math is hard to beat. It holds a 4.7-star rating on the App Store.

For users who specifically want Perplexity on their Mac as a native app, our walkthrough on how to download and use Perplexity AI on your Mac covers the cleanest setup.

Conclusion

The simplest version of Perplexity pricing in 2026: $0 free, $20 Pro, $200 Max, $10 Education Pro, $40-$325 per seat for Enterprise, plus an Agent API that bills models at provider rates and a Search API at $5 per 1,000 requests ($1 on Fast Search). Pick Pro for everyday research, Max for heavy Create files and apps and Computer workflows, and the API only when you’re embedding Perplexity into your own product.

If you want one bill that covers Perplexity-style search alongside Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok, try Fello AI from $11.99 a month. Otherwise, head to perplexity.ai/pricing, pick the tier that matches your usage pattern, and start asking better questions.

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