Perplexity Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, Real Costs and Hidden Fees

Perplexity Pro costs $20 a month, or $200 for the year, and the yearly plan is the right default for daily research. Max costs ten times the monthly price, which is the wrong bill if you only search. An Enterprise Pro seat is $40 a month, or $400 a year, and Enterprise Max is $325 a month. Free is $0. These figures were verified on Perplexity's plan and billing pages in September 2026.

Perplexity is an answer engine that searches the web and cites sources, sold as a subscription for people and a separate metered API for software you ship. Mixing those two bills is how a research habit turns into a second invoice.

Toolradar data: the AI assistants ranking we publish evaluated 1,462 tools, updated September 2026, and Perplexity's consumer price still sits on the same monthly rung as ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro. Our Perplexity review covers the product, this page is the bill, and the product record lives on Perplexity's Toolradar page.

Plan	What you pay	Who should buy	Cap that should stop you
Free	$0	A few searches a week	3 Pro searches a day, 1 Research query a month
Pro	$20/mo, or $200/year	Daily research with citations	No monthly Computer credits after a one-time bonus
Education Pro	$10/mo with SheerID	Verified students and educators	Pro features, plus Learn Mode
Max	$200/mo, or $2,000/year on the web	Computer most of the day	10,000 Computer credits a month
Enterprise Pro	$40/mo, or $400/year per seat	A team whose chats must stay out of training	400 Pro searches a week, API not included
Enterprise Max	$325/mo, or $3,250/year per seat	The few people who need the top caps	4,000 Pro searches a week, 15 videos a month
API	Metered tokens plus request fees	An app you run yourself	Separate from every chat subscription above

Free covers a sample, then the daily cap stops the work

The free plan is enough to judge the product, because answers already include citations and a basic model, and it is not a workday plan. Perplexity's plan comparison sets free Pro Search at 3 a day and Research at 1 a month, with no Comet Assistant, no advanced models, and no file or app creation.

That daily cap is why the free tier runs out. Comet Assistant, the browser agent, is off on this tier. File uploads exist but stay on a limited weekly allowance, and images you paste count toward the same allowance. A few questions a week can stay here, while a brief you finish inside Perplexity will hit the wait before it hits a charge.

Pro is the plan for a normal research day

Pro is the individual plan, billed monthly or as one annual charge, and it is the seat for weekday research. Perplexity's pricing page lists the monthly price, and its help center lists the annual invoice at the yearly figure in the table. You get extended Pro Search, model choice, image generation, limited video, and Create files and apps, on a monthly allowance Perplexity describes as average use rather than a fixed count, so a heavy week can still throttle you.

The Pro article, checked September 2026, includes GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Pro answers carry 10 times as many citations as free, which is why this plan is for cited research. Best mode for quick searches has no quota, while advanced-model access can still be limited in a heavy week and Pro Search stays on a weekly allowance.

Projects accept up to 50 file uploads, and uploads are not unlimited on Free, Pro, or Max: the allowance resets on a rolling week, connector files count, and the account page does not show how many you have left.

Buy Pro when Perplexity is how you check facts, and you are not yet living in Computer. Writers, founders, and operators who open it most days will feel the jump from three Pro searches a day. ChatGPT vs Perplexity is the product comparison, and if you would not notice Perplexity missing by the afternoon, skip the annual charge and stay on free.

Education Pro is half the Pro price, if SheerID says yes

Education Pro is $10 a month for students and educators who pass SheerID, a discount for one person rather than a department. It includes the Pro feature set, Learn Mode, and education-specific tips. Perplexity's plan article says that price is the discount, and there is no annual Education price on the page.

The same article says Education Pro includes unlimited Pro Searches. The comparison table still lists those searches as a weekly allowance, the same wording it uses for ordinary Pro. Confirm the cap on the upgrade screen before you budget around unlimited. A campus contract is Enterprise Pro, not a stack of student seats.

Max is a credit plan, not a smarter search box

Max includes everything in Pro, the highest access to advanced models, more room on Create files and apps, priority support, and early access to new products. Perplexity prices the yearly option at $2,000, sold on the web app only. A web subscriber who upgrades inside a mobile app can open a second Max subscription, so the upgrade belongs on the web app.

Computer credits are the real difference, and Max includes 10,000 of them a month. A new Max subscription also gets a one-time bonus of 35,000 credits that expires in 30 days. Pro gets a one-time bonus of 4,000 credits, also gone in 30 days, and then no monthly credits at all. Those are Computer credits, not the 4,000 weekly Pro searches on an Enterprise Max seat. Perplexity's credits article currently prices 100 credits at $1. On that rate, a month of included Max credits is a side budget next to the subscription, and the expiring Max bonus is $350 that does not renew.

Brain, a memory layer inside Computer, is in research preview for Max subscribers and is free during that preview. Rollout is gradual, so a new Max account may not see it on day one. Perplexity says models are not trained on what Brain writes. Do not buy Max for Brain until it shows up in the account.

Skip Max until you can name the Pro limit that is costing you time, or until Computer is the work. Search-heavy users who never open Computer are paying for a credit balance they will not spend. The best AI search engines shortlist is the right check before you jump a full order of magnitude in price.

Enterprise is an admin product wearing a seat price

Enterprise Pro is the company seat: every Pro feature, central billing, shared projects, file connectors, and the privacy default that matters. Perplexity says Enterprise data is never used for model training. On Pro, Education Pro, and Max, training is opt-out. That default is the reason to pay for a seat once customer text sits in the chat, while a stack of personal Pro plans stays cheaper until you need the ban.

You are billed for active members, and an organization can mix the two enterprise seats. Adding a seat is prorated, and removing one credits the next renewal, while invoices themselves are offered on annual subscriptions. During the first month a 30-day seat commitment means removals do not shrink that first invoice.

Eligible schools and nonprofits, outside the student program, can get Enterprise Pro at $30 a seat per month or $300 a seat per year by contacting support. Larger teams and government agencies can ask for a discount too, and that price is not on the public card.

Perplexity calls the annual Enterprise Pro price a 20% discount versus monthly. Twelve months at the monthly seat price come to $480, and the annual seat is two months free. Consumer annual prices, and the Enterprise Max yearly seat, follow that same pattern.

The published caps, from Perplexity's plan comparison in September 2026, are the part a buyer can actually budget. Individual Pro and Max do not get a fixed search count, only "average use" versus "advanced use."

Limit	Free	Enterprise Pro	Enterprise Max
Pro searches	3/day	400/week	4,000/week
Research queries	1/month	50/month	500/month
Comet Assistant	No	80/month	800/month
File and app creation	No	50/month	500/month
File upload sessions	Limited	100/week	1,000/week

Enterprise Max also allows 10,000 personal files, 5,000 files per project, and 15 videos a month. Each video is 8 seconds, with audio, in a 16:9 frame. The organization file repository is retired on October 1, 2026, and files left there are deleted. SOC 2 Type II and end-to-end encryption sit on this tier. API access is not included on either enterprise seat, and an admin cannot manage someone else's API credits.

Ten annual Enterprise Pro seats cost $4,000 for the year. The same ten seats billed monthly cost $4,800 over a year. Ten annual Enterprise Max seats cost $32,500 for the year, which is the bill for the people who will use the top caps, not a default for the whole company.

Computer credits are the fee the plan card hides

Computer is Perplexity's agent for multi-step work across files and connectors, and it is what makes a flat subscription stop being flat. Ask searches do not spend credits, and Pro Search is a separate cap. Credits pay for Computer tasks, and an effort setting changes the coordinating model without capping the spend.

Perplexity publishes two pictures of a light task on the same credits article. The quick line says about 15 to 70 credits, and the worked table starts Light at 100 to 350 credits. Budget with the table, because the page says actual use can differ.

Complexity	Typical credits	What a task looks like
Light	100 to 350	Summarize a source and pull out risks
Complex	350 to 950	A multi-step comparison or report
Heavy	875 to 2,275	A deck with market sizing and financials
Mega	2,400 to 9,800	A dashboard plus data collection

A mega task can consume nearly the entire monthly Max allotment. After the one-time bonus expires, a Pro subscriber who wants Computer has to buy credits or move to Max, and purchased credits stay until they are used.

Auto-refill stays off until you turn it on, and the trigger is 500 credits on Pro and 2,500 on Max. Every Max account caps credit charges for the billing period, the default equals one extra month of Max, and you can raise it as high as $5,000.

Enterprise Computer is a shared pool, so one heavy user can spend what the rest of the team counted on. Each seat includes some monthly credits, the exact number is in the admin account rather than on the public price card, and usage billing stays off until an admin opts in. Perplexity says those allowances can change by region and plan.

AIpresso is the short daily brief for buyers watching AI prices move. Get it here if you would rather not reopen vendor pages every time a credit rate changes.

The API is a second price list

The Perplexity API does not come with Pro, Max, or Enterprise. You pay tokens plus, on Sonar models, a request fee that depends on how much web context you pull. A person chatting in the app should stay on a subscription, because API credits are a separate balance from Computer credits, including credits bought through AWS Marketplace.

Model	Input per million tokens	Output per million tokens
Sonar	$1	$1
Sonar Pro	$3	$15
Sonar Reasoning Pro	$2	$8
Sonar Deep Research	$2	$8

Sonar Deep Research also bills citation tokens, a search fee, and reasoning tokens on top of that row. Sonar's low-context request fee is $5 per 1,000 requests, and multi-step Pro Search on Sonar Pro goes up to $22 per 1,000 at high context.

The Search API is $5 per 1,000 successful requests, and one request can carry up to five queries as a single billing unit. Web search as an agent tool is $0.0025 per call. A code sandbox is $0.03 per session, billed as a window of up to 20 minutes.

What ten people pay against ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini

The personal monthly price lines up across these assistants, and the company invoice does not. The rows below were taken from each vendor's own plan pages in September 2026.

Buyer	Perplexity	ChatGPT	Claude	Gemini
Most workdays	Pro, monthly or yearly	Plus, monthly only, same monthly price	Pro monthly, or $17/mo annual	AI Pro at $19.99/mo
Heavy daily use	Max, yearly only on the web	Lower Pro tier at $100/mo	Max from $100/mo	Ultra from $99.99/mo, or $199.99/mo
10 people, standard, annual	$4,000 for the year	$2,400 for the year	$2,400 for the year	Ten personal plans, not one workspace

ChatGPT Plus matches Pro's monthly price and has no annual discount, and neither do Go or the two Pro tiers, so those plans never get cheaper for paying yearly. New sign-ups to the higher Pro tier were paused on September 10, 2026, so a new buyer may not be able to get that tier. Business standard seats are $25 a month when billed monthly, and the annual seat matches Perplexity Pro's monthly rate, which is why ten of them cost $2,400 for the year. Premium seats on that workspace are $125 a month on a monthly invoice.

Claude's monthly Pro price matches Perplexity Pro, and the annual Claude Pro price is $17 a month with the yearly amount billed up front. A standard Team seat is $25 when billed monthly, with a minimum of two seats, so one person cannot open it. Read the ChatGPT pricing page, the Claude pricing page, and the Gemini pricing page before you treat the invoices as the same product. The matching reviews are ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and the records on Toolradar are ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Gemini AI Pro is a personal plan at the price in the table, with 4 times the free Gemini allowance and 5 TB of storage, not a shared admin console. Eligible United States college students can get that plan free through December 31, 2026, then it renews at the Pro price. Perplexity's student price is a paid monthly seat, not a free year.

For writing and coding, start from the best AI chatbots shortlist and Claude vs ChatGPT. For cited web research, Perplexity's seat matches the work even though the annual company invoice is higher. Dupple's head-to-head is Perplexity vs ChatGPT vs Claude, and the wider map is the ChatGPT alternatives roundup.

Fees the subscription price leaves out

Computer credits, at 100 per dollar, are how a flat month stops being flat once the seat price is only the floor. A Pro bonus that dies in 30 days is not a monthly allowance, and a Max spending cap equal to another month of Max will charge that if auto-refill is on.

Annual Max is sold on the web only, and upgrading a web Pro plan through the mobile app can start a second subscription, so you pay twice until someone cancels one of them. Refunds outside special regions are short: 24 hours on a monthly plan and 72 hours on an annual plan. Buyers in the EU, UK, or Turkey have 14 days. One refund is the limit, and a terminated account does not get the unused time back.

Personal Pro plans are cheaper per person than Enterprise Pro seats. Five people who do not need the training ban or a shared project should not open an organization to get one invoice. The extra money buys admin controls and a default that keeps chats out of model training.

Which Perplexity plan earns the invoice

For one person, take the annual Pro invoice, or stay on free. Move to Max only after the Pro search cap, or the missing Computer credits, is a weekly event you can describe. Education Pro is the right card if SheerID approves you, once you have read the search cap on that screen.

For a team, put Enterprise Max only on the people who will use it. A quiet teammate does not donate searches to a heavy one, and a $32,500 year for ten Max seats is an expensive way to give everyone the same badge. Ordinary cited search belongs on Enterprise Pro, and a product you ship belongs on the API, because a chat seat never includes that meter.

For a product, Sonar should carry ordinary traffic and Sonar Pro should be a choice you can see on the bill, because output tokens cost several times the input rate. If the workflow is an agent rather than a chat window, use the best AI agents guide.

AIpresso follows the AI price changes that show up on a renewal, in a few minutes a day. Join the brief before the next seat change lands in a renewal email.

How these Perplexity prices were checked

This breakdown was written by Louis Corneloup, founder of Dupple and Toolradar, for buyers comparing Perplexity seats. We checked Perplexity's pricing page, the plan comparison, the Max article, the Enterprise billing FAQ, the credits article, and the API pricing docs on September 23, 2026. ChatGPT figures come from OpenAI's Plus, Pro, and Business help pages, Claude figures come from Anthropic's pricing page, and Gemini figures come from Google's US subscriptions and about pages. Toolradar's live AI assistants ranking that same month is the source of the 1,462 tool count. No vendor paid for a place on this page. How this site publishes is explained on the AIpresso about page.

FAQ

How much does Perplexity cost in 2026?

Free is $0. Pro is $20 a month, or the yearly figure in the table above. Max is $200 a month, or $2,000 for the year on the web app. Education Pro is $10 a month after SheerID verification. Enterprise Pro is $40 per seat per month, or $400 per seat per year, and Enterprise Max is $325 per seat per month, or $3,250 per seat per year. The API is a separate meter, and Computer credits are an extra purchase once the included balance runs out.

Is Perplexity free?

Yes. The free plan includes cited answers on a basic model, with 3 Pro searches a day and 1 Research query a month, which is a sample rather than a workday. It does not include advanced models, Comet Assistant, or file and app creation, and file uploads stay on a limited weekly allowance.

What is the difference between Perplexity Pro and Max?

Pro is the everyday research plan, with monthly or annual billing, model choice, and a one-time Computer credit bonus that expires in 30 days and does not renew. Max adds the highest model access, early features, and 10,000 Computer credits every month, plus a larger one-time bonus that also expires in 30 days. The yearly Max invoice is sold on the web app only.

How much is Perplexity Enterprise per seat?

Enterprise Pro is $40 a month, or $400 a year, for each active member. Enterprise Max is $325 a month, or $3,250 a year. You can mix the two seats, and chats are not used to train models, which is the admin reason to pay for a seat. API credits are not included, and the first month has a 30-day commitment, so removing someone does not reduce that first invoice. Eligible schools and nonprofits can ask support for Enterprise Pro at $30 a month or $300 a year.

Does Perplexity Pro include API access?

No. Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro, and Enterprise Max do not include API usage. Developers buy API credits separately, and enterprise admins cannot manage those credits for other users. Sonar is the cheap end of that meter, and a request fee sits on top of the token rates when the call searches the web.

Is Perplexity cheaper than ChatGPT?

At the main individual step, the monthly price matches ChatGPT Plus, and Perplexity is the one that also sells an annual individual discount. ChatGPT's lower Pro tier is $100 a month, and Claude Max starts in that same band. For ten people on standard annual seats, Perplexity Enterprise Pro is $4,000 for the year, while ChatGPT Business and Claude Team each come to $2,400. Gemini AI Pro is $19.99 a month for one person and is not a shared workspace.

What happens when Perplexity credits run out?

Computer tasks pause and resume when credits are available again, and they are not cancelled. On Pro, after the 30-day bonus, you buy more credits or move to Max, which refills 10,000 credits a month. Auto-refill can buy credits when the balance drops under 500 on Pro or 2,500 on Max, and it stays off until you enable it. Ask searches do not spend credits, and Pro Search still has its own cap, separate from the credit balance.

Cite this: AIpresso, "Perplexity Pricing in 2026: Every Plan, Real Costs and Hidden Fees", September 2026.