Perplexity pricing: Pro $20, Max $200, and yearly saves 16.7%

How much does Perplexity cost on each plan?

Perplexity has six plans, and the cheapest with Deep Research is Pro at $20 a month. We read each row from Perplexity's pricing page, its plan guide, its Max article, its Enterprise billing FAQ and its US App Store listing on 8 November 2026. US prices, before tax:

Pro is the cheapest plan that has the model picker and Deep Research in it. On Free you still get what Perplexity calls "practically unlimited basic searches," but only a handful of Pro Searches. Perplexity doesn't print a Pro Search count for any of its plans. Our Perplexity Pro limits page tracks what the open-source usage trackers assume it is. If you want Max on a yearly plan, you have to buy it on the web, since "Annual billing for Max is only available on perplexity.ai." Enterprise seats also come without the API. Perplexity's FAQ says "API usage is not included with Enterprise Pro or Enterprise Max." Prices also differ outside the US, so check your own checkout page.

Is the yearly Perplexity plan cheaper?

Yes. The yearly plan is 16.7% cheaper on every paid tier, which is two free months a year. We divided each yearly price by 12 and set it against the monthly price, all read on 8 November 2026:

In dollars, a year on the yearly plan saves you $40 on Pro and $400 on Max. It saves $80 a seat on Enterprise Pro and $650 a seat on Enterprise Max. There's a catch, and it's the refund window. Perplexity's refunds article gives yearly buyers outside the EU, the UK, Turkey, South Korea and Brazil "a full refund within 72 hours of the original purchase date and time." If you pay by the month, you get 24 hours. So it's best to pay yearly only once you know you'll keep it.

The App Store sells the same two Pro prices, $20 and $200, so you don't pay more on an iPhone in the US. Students pay $10 a month on Education Pro. Perplexity Pro student discount covers the checks, and Perplexity Pro free trial explains why there's no trial you can start on your own.

What does a month of Perplexity actually cost?

A month of Perplexity costs $16.67 to $20 for most people, and it only goes higher if you run Perplexity Computer hard. Computer runs on credits, and Perplexity's credits article says "100 credits equals $1." In the US App Store you can buy 500 credits for $5, 1,000 for $10, 2,500 for $25 or 5,000 for $50. That's the same rate on all of them. Ask searches don't spend any credits at all.

Here are five months that people actually have, with the arithmetic shown:

So Pro plus credits stays cheaper than Max until you get to about 18,000 credits a month. At that point they both cost $200. The monthly credits on Max "do not roll over," and the one-time bonuses run out in about 30 days. Max can still be worth it for the models and the limits that Pro doesn't have, and Is Perplexity Max worth it works through that.

How much does the Perplexity API cost?

The Perplexity API costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens on perplexity/sonar, plus $0.0025 per web search, as of November 2026. The Sonar API many guides still quote is gone. Perplexity's Sonar migration guide says: "Sonar Chat Completions support ended on September 27, 2026." Synchronous calls keep working because Perplexity now rewrites them as Agent API requests. Async calls stopped.

The guide maps Sonar and Sonar Pro to the Agent API's fast effort level. Sonar Reasoning Pro maps to low and Sonar Deep Research to high. Here are the rates on Perplexity's Agent API models page and pricing page, read 8 November 2026:

The search costs more than the tokens do. A Sonar answer with 1,000 tokens in, 500 out and one search costs $0.00025 + $0.00125 + $0.0025, which is $0.004. The search is 62.5% of that. Tokens are cheap. If you run 10,000 answers in a month, that's $2.50 of input, $12.50 of output and $25 of search, so $40 in all. Perplexity's changelog moved the fast preset, where Sonar and Sonar Pro now land, to Fast Search in September 2026, so a migrated call's search costs $0.001. That makes the answer $0.0025 and the 10,000-answer bill $25. The $20 you pay for Pro would buy 5,000 of those answers on the API, but Pro doesn't come with any API credit. Perplexity bills "API Platform credits" on their own.

What does Perplexity cost next to the rest of your AI stack?

Perplexity Pro plus ChatGPT Plus plus Claude Pro costs $60 a month, which is $720 a year. It adds up fast. Those are the three subscriptions people stack most often for research, writing and code. We read OpenAI's Codex pricing page for Plus and Anthropic's pricing page for Claude on 8 November 2026:

Whizi, which publishes this page, can cut that bill if most of what you do is chat. Whizi Pro costs $29.99 a month, or $19.99 a month billed yearly. It puts Claude, GPT, Gemini and Perplexity's own Sonar Pro in one chat, with web search on by default, and the credits a message costs vary by model. It won't replace all of it. Whizi has no Comet browser, no Computer agent, no Model Council and no API. It also has no coding agent, so keep Claude Code or Codex for the work in your repo. If Comet or Computer is the reason you pay Perplexity, keep Perplexity. The cheapest way to use Claude and GPT runs the same math for chat on its own.

Is Perplexity Pro worth $20 a month?

Perplexity Pro is worth $20 if you search with citations every day and want to pick the model. It isn't worth it for occasional lookups, because Free's basic search has no practical cap. Pro's help article promises "10x as many citations per answer" and says "'Best' mode is available without quota limits." It also warns that advanced model access "may be limited during weeks of especially heavy usage." Is Perplexity Pro worth it tests the plan against ChatGPT and Claude.