By Gavin Phillips
Publication Date: 2026-06-05 20:00:00
I first signed up to Perplexity Pro in 2023. This was when Perplexity was really taking the AI fight to ChatGPT, and before Claude and Gemini made the enormous gains that made them OpenAI’s biggest competitors.
It was a glorious time. Perplexity fused the conversational style of ChatGPT with the in-depth search results of Google, and for a while, it was easily the best alternative to ChatGPT.
But times have changed. Perplexity embarked on an enormous freemium giveaway via PayPal, ISP partnerships, and other methods, promising every single person a Pro account. It devalued the service and angered those who had paid. There have been issues with model switching, low-quality sources, drastically swinging rate limits, and poor responses, with equally baffling decisions by Perplexity itself.
That’s why when my Pro account lapsed, I was in no way rushing back with credit card in hand.
