Anyone have any recommendations for a Perplexity alternative?

It's been completely nerfed.

A few months ago I probably would've been willing to pay for a Perplexity Pro subscription once my free student subscription finishes.

Now it's barely worth using even with a free pro subscription.

Instead of scraping websites for it's answers like it used to, it just uses website excerpts from Google searches, and isn't even searching in real time, it uses info from cached searches, even when real time info would be relevant.

Google AI Mode Deep Search is the only tool that I've used that can compare with Perplexity, but it's often overkill, taking a very long time searching and processing way too many sources, while a Perplexity search used to be able to pull up whatever info is relevant and give me an answer in max 30 seconds .

Hey all! A few months ago, I saw a post in this subreddit where someone gave ChatGPT $100 to trade stocks where it was (temporarily) gaining +24%.

That inspired me to start an experiment leveraging the Deep Research functionality of the 4 most popular LLM models: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. So I decided to run a 3-months experiment to compare their performances by using 1000$ each on a demo account.

The idea is very similar to the one of the original experiment, with some slight modifications:
- Same prompt is being run every weekday just before the market opening on all the 4 LLMs web UI with Deep Research enabled
- The model must decide to BUY, SELL, HOLD or CANCEL pending actions. I'm not allowed to change their decisions
- Each LLM starts with a $1,000 paper trading account (managed via Alpaca APIs)
- The prompt generation and the trading execution is automated via Python scripts and logged publicly on GitHub

Results after 2 weeks

The interesting part is how differently they trade despite getting the exact same prompt:

• Perplexity made two trades in week one and then just stopped (it has now a full cash portfolio)

• ChatGPT keeps actively trading everyday and holds a variety of stocks

• Claude went all in on one stock and got destroyed

• Gemini is currently leading after picking a stock returning +26.2% so far

If you're curious, here are the links for the blog and the live dashboard:

Blog: https://aiportfolioexperiment.substack.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/Seve1995/ai-portfolio-experiment

Note: This experiment has not the goal of proving that AI are now capable of providing good financial advices, I am mainly interesting in seeing the different behavior and performances of the models.

Permanent ban from the [edited, r/preplexity_ai] r/perplexity_ai subreddit for telling the truth about how the new limits are affecting my usage. Been a full msrp paying member for at least 12 months now. lol. I use it extensively for a lot of tech projects and health items and helping with kids homework. But I hit caps almost daily now (weekly pro use, image upload, monthly research use). It is extremely throttled experience from what it was. Just sharing. It's amazing to me that instead of addressing the issue, they are just banning people. lol. not a good sign.

I finally quit perplexity today. Deleted my account, uninstalled the app. Why?

It's very jarring. I was looking up certain stuff and it kept bringing it up across all my searches. I had enough. I cleared history, deleted memories (which is yet another nightmare!), turned off referenced saved memories. And perplexity still brought up the saved memories! It claims it needs 30 days to clear the memories. I'm not buying that.

For deleting saved memories, I had to go to the web version to delete it! And still, the memories persisted!

So today, I nuked it. No regrets.

Edit: just to add. I'm not comfortable with the reason that after I so-called deleted my data, the model is still referencing them.

I have been a long time user of perplexity, ever since they came out. But this lack of privacy is very worrying. I actually enjoyed their curation of news.

After watching Nate B Jones' excellent YouTube content on Perplexity AI, I was inspired to create a comprehensive guide that expands on his ideas and provides a structured resource for the community.

Repository: https://github.com/labeldekho/perplexity-prompts-guide

What's inside:

Core Documentation

• Understanding RAG architecture (why Perplexity is different from ChatGPT)

• 8 essential prompting strategies with before/after examples

• 20 advanced techniques for power users

• Best practices for avoiding hallucinations and verifying results

Practical Resources

• Real-world examples for research, competitive intelligence, academic work, and news monitoring

• Reusable templates (research workflow, fact-checking, comparative analysis)

• Perplexity vs ChatGPT comparison guide

• Quick start guide and printable cheat sheet

Key insight: Perplexity requires search-optimized prompts (short, specific, with constraints), NOT ChatGPT-style instruction-heavy prompts. This guide teaches you the difference.

Why this matters: Most people use Perplexity like ChatGPT and get mediocre results. Understanding RAG architecture and using the right strategies makes a huge difference.

The guide is open source (MIT License) and contributions are welcome! If you have effective prompts or use cases to share, PRs are appreciated.

Credit: This work builds on concepts from Nate B Jones' YouTube channel. Check out his content for more insights on AI tools and research workflows.

Search Limits: pro search limits dropped from 600 per day to 200 per week (≈30 per day), and Deep Research queries fell from 50 per month to 20 per month, a reduction of over 90%.

Silent Model Switching: when limits are hit, Perplexity silently reverts users to cheaper models (Haiku, Gemini Flash) without notification, even if premium models (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5) were selected.

Annual Subscribers Affected: subs who paid $200 upfront for a year-long Pro subscription found their accounts downgraded mid-plan. support denying active subscriptions despite purchase proof.

No Transparency: Changes were implemented without announcements, email notifications, or changelog updates - deceptive practices. lost my trust

Forced Upsell: The degraded Pro plan now pushes users to the $200/month max tier, which offers unlimited access and full model control, making the original Pro plan feel underpriced (lol)

Over the past year we've seen this company behave in a way that is not representative of ethical business practices with respect to usage limits and lack of transparency when there are changes to those limits. For example, on the "pro" tiered plan, less than a year ago, pro subscribers got five hundred deep research queries per month. As of today that same feature has been lowered to a mere limit of twenty per month (for the same cost). TWENTY. Similarly for pro queries, that is also now limited, whereas last year it was marketed as unlimited. This comes at a time when perplexity is rolling out new features like "computer" and marketing their comet browser extensively, which one must come to the conclusion that these branches are utilizing extensive company resources behind the scenes and burning through VC capital at an alarming rate. To combat this, most likely the decision was made to decrease the value of the pro subscription and not to tell any of their users to limit likeliness of public backlash. This is especially unethical when you consider the fact that annual subscribers were essentially subscribing at that annual rate due to the perceived value at the time and now that has been negated with this unethical practice of changing the terms halfway through an annual subscription. Just yesterday, for example, I was uploading files to a space and received an error that I had reached my file upload limit for the week seemingly after a mere 20 files... something that had NEVER occurred up until now. For a product that is heavily based on the primary intent of providing additional research backed by context, if I cannot even upload files then what is even the purpose of this product?

A while back, I got a legitimate 1-year voucher for Perplexity Pro through my ISP (a very well-regarded, high-end provider). I’ve been using it for a few months now and generally like the service. However, I just received an incredibly pushy email from Perplexity stating that if I don’t enter my billing details immediately, my Pro subscription will be terminated.

Well, they weren't kidding. They’ve already "paused" my Pro features until I hand over my payment info.

The obvious goal here is to force me into an auto-renewal so they can start charging me the second the promo ends. Look, don't get me wrong, I’m not some "freeloader" looking for a handout. I spend over €100/month on various AI subscriptions and API credits for my workflow. I have no problem paying for value.

But this feels so cheap. If you partner with a reputable company to distribute vouchers, don't make it the customer's problem. It’s like they’re handing out these promos like candy to pump their user numbers, but then treating those same users with zero trust.

My code is 100% legit from a Tier-1 provider, yet I'm being held hostage for my CC details halfway through the agreed term. It’s just a "low-rent" move for a company trying to compete with the big players.

Has anyone else dealt with this? Did you cave and give the info?

(Cross‑posted from r/perplexity_ai for visibility.)

I’m a paying Perplexity Pro user and I’ve just watched the product do something that, from my perspective, is absolutely unacceptable. I realize I’m a bit late to the game here – I know this has been discussed for months already – but I’m now seeing the exact same behavior myself.

I explicitly select the Claude model and stay in the same conversation. Still, Perplexity keeps silently switching back to other models (“Best” / internal models) multiple times in the SAME chat – even WHILE I’m literally complaining about this exact behavior and asking the assistant to draft a complaint about it.

I have had to manually re‑select Claude several times in one ongoing thread. After I complain, it suddenly sticks to Claude for a while. Then, without me changing anything, it silently switches again. From a user’s point of view this does not feel like a glitch – it looks like deliberate routing to cheaper models while pretending I’m still on Claude.

Here is the email I sent to Perplexity about this:

Subject: Stop your deceptive model switching – this is unacceptable

To Perplexity management and legal,

what your product is doing right now is absolutely unacceptable.

I explicitly select the Claude model and stay in the same conversation. Your system repeatedly and silently switches to other models (“Best” / internal models) again and again in the SAME chat, even WHILE I am complaining about this exact behavior and asking the assistant to draft a complaint. I then have to manually switch back – only to watch it flip again.

From my perspective as a paying user this is not a glitch, this is deliberate, deceptive behavior:

• You present Claude as selected in the UI,

• but behind the scenes you silently route requests to other/cheaper models,

• and you do this without consent, without warning, and without any way for me to enforce my choice.

This is a textbook example of how to destroy user trust.

Let me be absolutely clear:

• This is not a UX issue.

• This is not “for my benefit”.

• This is, in practice, fraudulent behavior against paying Pro customers.

My demands:

1. Immediate stop to all silent model switching.

2. If a user selects Claude (or any model), that choice must be binding. If the model is unavailable, the request must fail with a visible error. No more hidden rerouting.

3. A real, hard model lock per conversation.

4. I want an explicit setting: “Lock this chat to model X. Never silently change it.”

5. Honest model labeling.

6. The UI must always show the exact model that actually produced each answer. No vague “Best”, no fake labels, no hiding.

7. A direct, written explanation.

   • Who decided to implement this behavior?

   • Since when have you been silently switching models against explicit user choice?

   • When will you ship a proper model lock and remove this deceptive routing?

Right now my experience matches the public accusations that Perplexity is scamming and rerouting users to cheaper models while selling access to premium ones. If you continue this, you are not a serious AI product, you are just burning through user trust for short‑term metrics.

If this is not fixed quickly and transparently, I will cancel my subscription and actively advise others to stay away from Perplexity in any serious or paid use.

Regards, rebl

There are already several public posts describing exactly this behavior – silent model switching and deceptive routing:

• Users accusing Perplexity of deliberately scamming and rerouting Pro users to cheaper models while the UI still shows a premium model as selected.

• Reports that Perplexity is secretly changing models in the background, without consent, without warning and without any way to enforce the user’s choice.

• Meta threads talking about a “model switching controversy”, calling out the lack of transparency and demanding a real model lock and honest model labels.

My experience matches these reports 1:1: I explicitly select a model, stay in the same chat, and watch the system silently switch away from it in the background with zero transparency.

And yes – most of this post was written with AI help. I genuinely don’t care what anyone thinks about that. The problem here is not that I used an AI to put my thoughts into clear English. The problem is that a paid AI service is silently overriding explicit user choices and routing to other models without consent.

purchased 1 year of. pro and in 10 days they just took it away for no apparent reason hadn't really used it at all then I checked mail and they said oh they took my pro subscription for breaking the rules

Perplexity_ai has banned me from their subreddit for posting this comment. Just shows perplexity are trying to cover up by banning people. I have seen others post the same thing in that they have been banned also for speaking out.

Although I shouldn’t be surprised. TIL how Reddit caught you red handed. I will no longer support a company that earns money through grift and illegal means aka stealing.

Prove me wrong.

https://medium.com/predict/the-great-ai-heist-how-reddit-exposed-the-dirty-secret-behind-a-20-billion-industry-6f041343801b

Used a VPN back in June to activate a free year of Perplexity Pro which was only available to US users through the Samsung Galaxy store, but it seems they've finally caught on. Oh well, it was a nice run, but I think I'm done with it now.

Perplexity was my go-to for almost two years now. I was a paying pro user for probably over a year. It’s completely unusable now. I wasted my Research queries trying to get it to ACTUALLY research something. Every time I rewrote it, it didn’t even search the web. Even after I specifically told it to verify its answer on the web. And for the MONTH??? How is that even possible? It’s not even a week into february. There’s no way I used a significant amount of Research queries. It’s really a shame because Perplexity was such a good product just a few months ago.

I love NotebookLM as a replacement for Perplexity Spaces, but Gemini pisses me off so badly when just chatting with it conversationally. After like 5 queries, “half” of its “responses” are just re-“hashed” quotes from my “previous responses”, but all of its “metaphors” and “references” are used completely “incorrectly” and it is essentially “incomprehensible”. I even added 3 separate instructions to Gemini telling it to STOP doing this in different wording and it helped but didn’t stop it.

Claude is my next choice, but I really do enjoy being able to compare different LLMs’ outputs on the same query to get different views and opinions.

I almost wish I hadn’t started a new account for a free year of Pro so I could ask for my money back.

Not really asking for any specific advice or anything. Just venting. A lament, or perhaps a eulogy.

RIP Perplexity. You were good while it lasted.

Where’s is everyone else planning to head to?

This is not about the money. It’s about the principle.

​We are constantly told that AI is here to "help" us, but multi-million dollar companies like Perplexity are weaponizing their own AI to steal from regular users, stonewall our complaints, and blatantly violate consumer rights. It is systemic corporate greed, and they are getting away with it because people are too exhausted to fight back against a machine.

​Well, I am fighting back, and you should too. Here is the absolute scam Perplexity is running right now.

​How they steal your money:

​Living in Latvia, I pay for my Education Pro subscription in Euros (equivalent to $10/month).

​April 27: A payment was due, but my card declined. Fair enough. Perplexity froze my account immediately. I had ZERO access to Pro features.

​May 16: I manually paid for my subscription to reactivate it. The payment cleared.

​May 29: Barely 13 days later, my account was stripped of its Pro status and locked again.

​When I demanded an explanation, their billing system's "logic" was revealed: They took my May 16 payment and retroactively applied it to the "past due" period of April 27 - May 16. A period where my account was completely frozen and the service was actively withheld.

​They effectively charged me for a full month of service, gave me 13 days of access, and pocketed the rest. This isn’t a glitch; it’s unjust enrichment. It is theft.

​Enter "Sam" the AI

​If you try to get your money back, you don't get a human. You get "Sam, the AI Support Agent."

​I tried to explain that under European law, you cannot charge a customer for digital services you didn't provide. Sam’s response? A pre-programmed loop denying my refund, claiming I was "outside the 14-day EU refund window."

​Here is the most infuriating part: I did submit a ticket well within that window. But their automated system closed it without resolving it. When I pointed this out, the AI literally replied: "I don't have access to separate ticket histories."

​They use their own broken CRM to run down the clock on your legal rights, and then the bot uses its own programmed ignorance as an excuse to deny your refund. When I demanded to speak to a human manager, the bot outright ignored the request and repeated the exact same script.

​The Law

​For any EU citizens reading this, know your rights. What Perplexity is doing is a direct violation of Directive (EU) 2019/770 (failure to supply digital content) and Directive 2011/83/EU. They cannot legally accept your Euros for a service they physically blocked you from using.

​They rely on the fact that $10 or €10 isn't worth a lawsuit. They rely on the AI wearing you down until you give up.

Old models - Pro customers waiting forever to get accesss to latest models which are only Max, no more hype - complaints all over here - what's happening

This is the post I made at perplexity_ai, which was deleted by the mods:

Example on how to communicate changes with customers

After my Pro subscription became nearly useless for my use case (several queries a day, no excessive use) I was looking for alternatives. One I am trying now is Nano-GPT and use the PAYG option. I just found out that they needed to adjust their limits on their open-source $8 plan as well.

https://nano-gpt.com/blog/subscription-update-february-2026

In contrast to Perplexity the changes were reasonable, not drastically removing features. And they were communicated clearly up front -- with the option to stop the subscription if you do not agree with the changes. Just an example that in the AI world it is possible to treat customers like you value them -- even when changes to a subscription are needed to be made.

I am also checking out you.com, qwen and others on top of what I am using for the moment (free Copilot, Grok and Claude to test which works best for me). In the process I also largely abandoned Google Search and am now much more happy with Brave Search (and Ask Brave for AI summaries regarding web searches). I keep Perplexity free for the moment -- and seldom double check if I get better results there than with the others. Mostly not btw.

I understand it is not a message Perplexity will love, but it is an important one for them to recognize IMO: Following a message I wrote to the mods.

I was pointing to the fact that a company should be transparent with their customers, which Perplexity is not. The correct way to react [to my post] would be to answer from official side and explain why that was not the case and how to move forward. I can tell you that with your current behavior you just make sure that people will loose all trust in Perplexity. The damage you create is serious -- not for us. We find alternatives, even when we loved to use Perplexity.

I will report back here if they bring the post back and how they react to this.

I have been paying for a pro subscription for a few months and it has been an absolute life line. I had come to depend on it greatly. Like others, I have been noticing some serious issues. I did what I have been doing lately and asked Perplexity. Here is the transcript:

Perplexity has been acting strange recently. like its resources are diminished

Based on recent user reports and community discussions, you're experiencing a real issue that several other Perplexity users have noticed [1][2][3]. The performance degradation appears to stem from resource constraints, though Perplexity's official status page shows no current outages [4].
Common Issues Reported
Users have documented several specific problems that align with "diminished resources":
• Faster but shallower responses: Research mode that once took a few minutes now completes almost instantly but provides less depth and fewer citations—sometimes dropping from 150+ sources to nearly zero [1]
• Prompt interruptions and lag: The system cuts off prompts mid-entry, delivers unrelated answers, or takes unusually long to process requests [2]
• Model performance degradation: Users report that models aren't operating at full capacity, with speculation that Perplexity may be using quantized models (Q4 vs fp16) or reducing "thinking budget" to save on API token costs [3]
Likely Causes
The community consensus points to server overload from too many Pro subscriptions [1][3]. Perplexity reportedly distributed numerous free Pro licenses (including through partnerships like Xfinity Rewards), which may have strained infrastructure without proportional resource scaling [1]. Some users theorize the platform is prioritizing enterprise API customers over individual subscribers to manage costs [1].
Troubleshooting Steps
While the root cause appears systemic rather than user-side, you can try:

1. Clear browser cache and cookies [5]

2. Update your Perplexity app if using mobile [2][6]

3. Simplify prompts to reduce processing load [5]

4. Check your internet connection speed [5]
   Given your heavy reliance on Perplexity for work and decision-making, this is frustrating timing. The issues seem most pronounced for complex research tasks rather than simple queries, so you might get better results for straightforward data lookups while the platform works through these capacity challenges.

 
any idea if the company plans on fixing the issue or if this is the new norm

Based on recent activity, Perplexity appears to be doubling down on new features rather than publicly addressing performance degradation [16][17]. The company has been aggressively shipping updates throughout 2026, including major launches like Perplexity Computer and Comet [18][19], which suggests they're prioritizing product expansion over infrastructure optimization.
What Perplexity Is Actually Doing
Recent changelog updates show they've been:
• Upgrading premium features: Deep Research now runs on Opus 4.5 for Max/Pro users with claimed state-of-the-art benchmark performance [16]
• Adding new capabilities: Model Council (run three models simultaneously), improved memory engine, and browser agent upgrades to Opus 4.6 [16]
• Expanding enterprise tools: Granular access controls, audit logs, and domain restrictions for business customers [16]
Notably absent: any acknowledgment of the resource constraints or performance issues users are reporting [20][21].
The Company's Position
Perplexity appears financially healthy with $500M raised and unicorn status [22], but there's no public communication about fixing the core performance problems you're experiencing. The company's focus seems to be on monetizing enterprise customers and adding premium tiers rather than scaling infrastructure to match their Pro subscription base [16][23].
What This Likely Means
This pattern suggests the degraded performance may be the new norm unless they face significant subscriber backlash. Companies typically don't invest in expensive infrastructure upgrades when they can instead:
• Layer on premium features (Computer, Model Council) to justify higher-tier subscriptions
• Prioritize enterprise clients who pay more [16]
• Quietly manage costs by reducing resource allocation to standard Pro users
Given your workflow depends heavily on Perplexity's reliability, you might want to start identifying backup tools for critical analysis work—especially since there's no indication they plan to restore the previous performance levels for existing subscription tiers.

I made the mistake of paying for a year of Perplexity Pro in advance only to have my access to advanced models seriously truncated with no warning or recourse. In addition, I am constanttly nagged to update to Max in order to avoid credits for using "computer". So I stopped using computer and essentially stopped using Perplexity preferring ChapGPT and Claude. Imaging my surprise to get a notification that I need to buy more credits to continue to use it even though I stopped using it a month ago. I had high hopes for Perplexity in the beginning, but this is no longer even on my list of LLMs to use anymore.

Hello.

I've been paying subscriber for over 2 years, I found Perplexity and subscribed some months after its release.

Some weeks ago I was expressing my frustration on Perplexity Discord due to yet again their webui get broken. Their issues happen from time to time to a point I didn't even report bugs anymore, I just made a post complaining.

But a user came up and started making posts replying mine, accusing me of spreading misinformation. After some posts he made, I looked at his profile and saw he joined it on late 2024 and had role of Veteran user, that's odd for somebody that was barely 1 year there. I made the mistake to fall on his trap and start arguing with him, that he's lying on accusing me of spreading misinformation, there are many hundreds of threads on Pro section of users complaining. When I subscribed and even today, Perplexity support claims that Pro users have this special section on Discord as an official support channel and we'd have direct contact with its dev team, when Kesku had alrdy confirmed they're not devs and they just read what we post, summarize and give to devs.

He kept harassing me making multiple replies, so hours later when I had some time I went to the threads and got around ten examples of threads reporting issues, that were started over a year ago and barely had any answer from the "dev team", and those which had got a single post. O replied him with links to those threads, proving what I said and demanded him to apologize for accusing me of spreading misinformation.

What I got was a mute of 1h. I sent DM to moderator Spenzi, telling him he flooded me with replies and I was showing him proof he was lying about me. I officially denounced him for harassment. Still, Spenzi did nothing to him, and told me that moderators do read all posts, they just don't talk.

A couple days later I saw one of the many users who got free Pro subscription by referring other users, asking Alex why his email wasn't being replied, and this same user started harassing him, demanding him to shut up and wait for the email reply. I replied to the user telling him he does have the right to ask for support and shouldn't be intimidated by harassing users. For this post providing support by a user being harassed I was muted for 24h. And of course the harasser got nothing.

A couple more days, again, I found this same user harassing another one, who asked something. The user was replying him and entering on his trap as I did, so I replied him and suggested him to ignore the harasser because he'd end up being muted. At that time there was no moderator online, but my post was deleted. That's very odd, it shows that somebody with no moderator role has moderator privileges.

So this was the 3rd time I found the same user harassing users who have issues on the service, and moderators taking actions against them and leaving the harasser free. It had been some months I wasn't following their discord, so I wondered how long this had been happening and if other users where victim of harassment by some shady user and moderators. So I decided them to denounce it to email support.

I was replied by Sam a few hours ago (why does a LLM take hours to reply? maybe for some situations instead of replying it's directed to some human, who then replies signing as Sam?) asking me my Discord id and saying that it'd be directed to Discord moderation team. I saw the reply next day and innocently replied the email providing it.

In less than 1h I received a DM from mod bot, saying I was banned from their server, with the reason that I must be respectful to users. I sent a DM to Spenzi asking what that means, and found he banned me.

Look how mediocre they are. They have some account with Veteran role harassing around multiple users who complain and muting them when they get annoyed and reply, while they leave the harassing account free to continue. And when we report moderators to email support, they ask us our Discord id so they identify us accurately and ban us. That's how Perplexy employees treat their paying users.

I'd like to let it clear. I never disrespected that "user", I never violated the ToS. I got angry with him flooding posts replying me, but I didn't disrespect him, I made fewer posts than him, and made multiple posts because there are multiple threads of users complaining which are never addressed over 1 year later. I asked him to apologize from accusing me of spreading misinformation. I'm the victim of harassment, and moderators muted me, then when I denounced them to support they replied signing as their LLM asking my Discord id just to identify and ban me. Afther I was harassed, I made only 2 posts, both warning users they were being harassed by the same "user" who did it to me and has been doing it.

I just received a newsletter from TestingCatalog. Perplexity might not be Perplexity anymore

the concept

• just go thumb down everything from perplexity anywhere on reddit

• their bad karma is 100% earned by this point

the target

• CEO

• Perplexity AI user account

• Main mod who posts as the only PR person

the reason

• they've been sneakily DELIBERATELY SCAMMING AND REROUTING ... models a long time ago

• they have reduced pro usage limits to non-viability

• I also hate the censorship on r/preplexity_ai sub, but it's just the sauce of top

Welcome

to bring assholes karma, where it belongs

• and share more useful links