Perplexity AI launches new ‘Max’ subscription priced at $200/month

Artificial intelligence search firm Perplexity AI Inc. is matching its industry rivals with the launch of a new $200-per-month subscription plan for power users, it said in a blog post today.

Billed as the company’s “most powerful subscription tier yet,” the Perplexity Max plan provides unlimited access to its new spreadsheet and report generation tool Labs, and users will also be the first to get to play with new upcoming tools, such as its AI-powered browser Comet, set to launch in the coming months.

Of course, Max subscribers will also get priority access in terms of standard web searches, as well as new features powered by new frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC.

Perplexity becomes the latest AI company to offer a more expensive, $200-per-month subscription tier, following in the footsteps of Open and its ChatGPT Pro subscription. Since then, Google LLC, Anthropic and Anysphere Inc.’s coding app Cursor have also released their own subscriptions in the same price category.

The company plans to launch an even more expensive subscription “Enterprise version of Max” at some point in the near future, giving customers unlimited Labs queries, but it isn’t clear exactly when that will happen.

There are cheaper offerings available, with the consumer-focused Pro plan starting at $20 per month, and the Enterprise Pro plan that costs $40 per month per user. According to Perplexity, that latter offering is still the best plan for companies that require team management, internal knowledge base integrations and enhanced security features. There’s also a free plan for those who don’t mind limitations on the number of searches they can perform.

Though seemingly every AI company venturing to launch higher-cost subscriptions, it underscores the reality that most are still struggling to turn a profit, given the ridiculously expensive costs associated with training and running AI models in production. In Perplexity’s case, it received about $34 million in annual revenue in 2024, largely from subscriptions, while burning through about $65 million per month on cloud servers and access to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s application programming interfaces. So it’s little wonder that Perplexity is keen to test the waters and see if people are willing to spend more on its services.

The company does at least appear to be growing its revenue. In January, it reported that it had reached an annual recurring revenue of around $80 million. But that’s still far short of what it needs to become profitable and justify its recently proposed valuation of $14 billion. That number was thrown around in May when reported emerged Perplexity is holding discussions with investors over a $500 million funding round. To date, there has been no confirmation of that round.

No doubt, though, Perplexity’s prospective investors will be concerned about the intensifying competition it faces in AI search. Google, the king of internet search, has been pushing its AI Mode search tool aggressively in recent months, and it bears a striking resemblance to Perplexity’s own application. Meanwhile, OpenAI has talked up the search capabilities of ChatGPT, and is also said to be considering launching its own browser, just like Perplexity is.

Perplexity faces a difficult task, for it doesn’t develop any of its own AI models, and must therefore rely on using its competitors’ models to compete against them in AI search.

Image: Perplexity AI