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Perplexity is launching a $200-per-month subscription plan for its power users, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday.
The plan, Perplexity Max, offers unlimited access to the startup’s spreadsheet and report generation tool, Labs, as well as early access to new features, including Perplexity’s forthcoming AI-powered browser, Comet. Max subscribers will also get priority access to any Perplexity services using the latest frontier models, such as OpenAI o3-pro and Claude Opus 4.
With the launch of Max, Perplexity became the latest AI provider to offer a hyper-premium subscription tier to capitalize on its power users. OpenAI was the first to do so with its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription, but Google, Anthropic, and Cursor have followed suit in recent months.
Perplexity now offers a variety of subscription plans. Alongside the $200-a-month Max plan, Perplexity offers a consumer Pro plan for $20-a-month, as well as an Enterprise Pro plan that costs $40-a-month per person. The startup says it will eventually offer a hyper-premium Max plan for Enterprise customers as well.
In 2024, Perplexity generated roughly $34 million in revenue largely driven by subscriptions to its $20-a-month Pro plan, but still burned about $65 million in cash, according to financials seen by The Information. Most of Perplexity’s cash burn reportedly comes down to heavy spending on cloud servers and buying access to AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Perplexity’s business seems to have grown since last year — it reportedly had an ARR of $80 million in January. However, the startup needs to generate significantly more revenue to justify its valuation. In May, Perplexity held late stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation. It’s unclear if that round officially closed.
But Perplexity’s competition in the AI search market is intensifying. In recent months, Google has heavily pushed AI mode, its own AI-powered search product which bears a striking resemblance to Perplexity’s app, in front of its users. OpenAI has also integrated search more deeply into ChatGPT in recent months, and has reportedly considered launching a browser of its own.
One key to Perplexity’s success may be its ability to work with AI providers, which it relies on for AI models, while simultaneously beating them in the AI search market. The added revenue from Perplexity Max subscribers could bolster the startup’s ability to compete in the space.
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