[imposterr]

You mean Perplexity Pro? That thing they tried and found that no one was willing to pay for cuz users say they want paid options but then jump boat to the free things always?

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-perplexity-pro

[coder543]

"Hundreds of thousands of people" are paying $20/mo for it, according to the CEO.[0] That seems like a very respectable place for such an early product to be.

It is extremely far from "no one".

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPmu_rKxJo&t=185s

[imposterr]

Even if we say 1M people pay $20/month, that's only $240M/year. That's not enough to continue to grow and support the free users sans-ads.

[rz2k]

I wonder if cross-examined on that claim, that he would clarify that they have hundreds of thousands of Pro customers. Something like: It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of how much Individual subscribers paid, but that is an accurate characterization of the number of Pro Perplexity subscribers.

The point is, I have a Pro Perplexity subscription for a year, because my ISP was offering year long access for free. I think it is pretty terrible. The answers when I select Claude 3.5 Sonnet as the model for Perplexity always seem incredibly stupid compared to the answers when I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic’s site (which I think is really good).

I like the idea of Perplexity supplying citations, but it seems more like it is parallel construction than citing how the model came up with a particular answer. And, it seems like it is tossing out superior results whenever it cannot pretend to show its work.

[cedws]

There’s too much choice for the consumer to charge for it. If not Perplexity then I can just use Phind, ChatGPT, or Claude for free.

Google got off the ground because they had magic sauce that made their product noticeably better. LLM-based search engines don’t have that, especially when they’re using an LLM built elsewhere.

[onemoresoop]

I remember at the beginning Google had the most user friendly ads back when agressive pop-up ads were everywhere. But once they grew they changed all that.

[tomrod]

Correct. We will always take free and minimize attention to ads. Ads are a bane and attention pollution.

[KMnO4]

What's up with every AI company having a $0 plan and a $20 plan? I would pay for a lot more of these tools if they were $5 (obviously with less capability than a $20 plan), but I don't use any one enough to justify nearly $300/year (post tax).

[maccard]

Farther up, someone else was complaining about a different tool costing $5/mo but saying they’d pay $3/mo for it.

Everyone having a $20 price point probably means that that’s the point they think the customers will pay for it. Will introducing a $5/mo tier quadruple their paid user base? My guess is no, but that a lot of the people currently paying $20 will drop to paying $5

[marcosdumay]

That's because payment processing and customer support take almost all of the $5, if not more than it.

[tomjen3]

The website does not say that the pro version is exempt from ads, and yeah, I am Not Happy about that.

[snypher]

I don't see where it says the Pro account has no ads, but I could be wrong.

[jsemrau]

I think we are getting there. Maybe it was a bit too early.

[halJordan]

Perplexity Pro has ads