Perplexity is launching a $200-per-month subscription plan for its energy customers, the corporate introduced in a blog post Tuesday.
The plan, Perplexity Max, provides limitless entry to the startup’s spreadsheet and report generation tool, Labs, in addition to early entry to new options, together with Perplexity’s forthcoming AI-powered browser, Comet. Max subscribers may also get precedence entry to any Perplexity companies utilizing the promo frontier fashions, comparable to OpenAI o3-pro and Claude Opus 4.
With the launch of Max, Perplexity turned the promo AI supplier to supply a hyper-premium subscription tier to capitalize on its energy customers. OpenAI was the primary to take action with its $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription, however Google, Anthropic, and Cursor have adopted swimsuit in current months.
Perplexity now provides a wide range of subscription plans. Alongside the $200-a-month Max plan, Perplexity provides a shopper Professional plan for $20 a month, in addition to an Enterprise Professional plan that prices $40 a month per individual. The startup says it should ultimately provide a hyper-premium Max plan for Enterprise clients as properly.
In 2024, Perplexity generated roughly $34 million in income largely pushed by subscriptions to its $20-a-month Professional plan, however nonetheless burned about $65 million in money, in keeping with financials seen by The Information. Most of Perplexity’s money burn reportedly comes right down to heavy spending on cloud servers and shopping for entry to AI fashions from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Perplexity’s enterprise appears to have grown since final yr — it reportedly had an ARR of $80 million in January. Nonetheless, the startup must generate considerably extra income to justify its valuation. In Might, Perplexity held late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation. It’s unclear if that spherical formally closed.
However Perplexity’s competitors within the AI search market is intensifying. In current months, Google has closely pushed AI Mode, its personal AI-powered search product, which bears a placing resemblance to Perplexity’s app, in entrance of its customers. OpenAI has additionally built-in search extra deeply into ChatGPT in current months and has reportedly considered launching a browser of its own.
One key to Perplexity’s success could also be its capacity to work with AI suppliers, which it depends on for AI fashions, whereas concurrently beating them within the AI search market. The added income from Perplexity Max subscribers might bolster the startup’s capacity to compete within the area.