Is Perplexity's $200 Subscription Worth It?

0:00This episode sponsored by HeadShop. If your piece is killing the vibe, HeadShop has the upgrade your session deserves. From sleek bongs and dab rigs to grinders, papers, and vaporizers, HeadShop has the gear to make every session feel better. All in one place, with fast shipping that makes upgrading easy. Go to HeadShop, that's H-E-A-D-S-H-O-P dot com. Spend$100 or more for free shipping and get the setup you'll actually be proud to put on the table. At HeadShop.com, your setup stops looking basic and starts looking like yours. HeadShop. H-E-A-D-S-H-O-P dot com. You don't just live in your home.

0:38You live in your neighborhood as well. So when you're shopping for a home, you want to know as much about the area around it as possible. Luckily, Homes.com has got you covered. So you can get to know the neighborhood without ever setting foot in it. Each listing features a comprehensive neighborhood guide from local experts, including detailed video overviews and unbiased information from a multitude of sources. Basically, everything you'd ever want to know about a neighborhood, including the number of homes for sale, transportation, local amenities, cultural attractions, even things like median lot size and a noise score, is available to you on homes.com.

1:13And if you have a family or plan on raising one, homes.com has all the information you need about the local schools in the area. Where your kids or future kids go to school is as important as any decision you'll make in the home shopping process. Homes.com. We've done your homework. One of our favorite tools for helping people with their side hustles make money online is Perplexity AI. This is a very big company. I would say probably like when you talk about the top AI companies, it's top 20 for sure. Maybe top, probably top 10 if you look at. It's hard to say because there's so many big companies like Apple, Google, Amazon that all have stuff and they've spent billions of dollars on them.

1:52So it's hard to compete with those that are in the kind of the top 10. But like startups that actually came into this space, Perplexity is definitely the top 10 startups. Like it's way up there with ChatGPT and Anthropoc. And they have just dropped a massive new update, which is essentially creating a new tier, a$200 a month tier. So today on the podcast, we're going to break down what exactly you get with this$200 a month tier, if it's worth it, if Jamie and I will be getting it, some of the features that we think are particularly interesting for online side hustles, what we might be using it for, what we've used Perplexi for in the past, all of that good stuff.

2:28But before we do, I wanted to mention that if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your own business using AI tools, we'd love to have you as a member of the AI Hustle School community. This is something Jamie and I do every single week. We essentially talk about how we're using AI to make money online, different side hustles that we're doing, and how we're using AI to grow and scale our businesses and careers. This week, we did a whole deep dive on something called the Amazon Influencer Program, and it's essentially a way that you can get paid a commission if you make videos about any sort of product in your house.

3:02And we talked a whole bunch about how you can actually get free stuff. Jamie got a free couch that was$1 ,000 from this. So there's a whole bunch of really interesting things there. We break down a whole video if that's interesting to you. If not, we have over 50 videos talking about different tools we use for online marketing to grow and scale businesses and a ton of other interesting stuff. It's$19 a month and the link is in the description. We'd love to have you as a member of the AI Hustle school community. All right, Jamie, tell me what was most interesting to you about Perplexity and their new$200 a month subscription plan.

3:36Is it too expensive or is it worth the money? yeah i mean i you know that first you know when you read that 200 price point that kind of makes you like choke a little bit it seems super expensive you know what value could they possibly add that would be worth it but i really i'm going to read off some of the different features and i really think there is a lot of potential here and i'm going to talk about why in a minute but they're offering access to their spreadsheet and report generation tool labs which is also like kind of along the similar i think maybe that is what labs is and then they also have a new ai powered browser that they're releasing which i'm super excited about called it's called comet um and they're also going to give you priority access to services using their latest models such as open ai's o3 pro and claude opus 4 so they're kind of including a lot, but I think, um, you know, that first one to me being able to generate spreadsheets and reports, I think perplexity could really knock it out of the park with, I feel like, uh, you know, sometimes I'll have chat GBT make me a spreadsheet and it's not like fully functional or not really like that good, even, even still, you know, they're not, but perplexity, I feel like has always had really great graphics, really great research.

4:56and in the up-to-date statistics and things like that. So I feel like they could really lean into this and actually have a really powerful report generation tool. So I'm pretty excited about that. But what are you reading about here, Jayden? Okay, sorry. I'm like, let's get into those because I think those tools are probably actually the big headline here. But just the thread I want to pull on for a second that I do think is really interesting is their new browser. So they haven't explicitly said what it is. they have a wait list if you go to perplexity.ai slash comment. It says a browser for agentic search by perplexity.

5:31And something that was interesting that they said, one of their spokespeople said, quote, just like perplexity reinvented search, we're also reinventing the browser. Something that I think is interesting here. Well, so first off, well, that's very intriguing to see what an actual browser would look like. I think that the thing that's interesting is they really did reinvent search. Like they forced Google to completely change the way they did search. If you look at what Google is doing with, um, you know, AI search today, it's largely a response to perplexity. Like you could say it's a response to chat GPT.

6:02That's probably like a portion of it, but honestly, like perplexity is the one that I think is really crushing. And it perplexity has a competitive advantage that Google can't really compete with. That's pretty tricky. And that is the fact that perplexity allows you to access all of the AI models on their platform to power your search. So like Google, they've gotten Gemini 2.5 pro, which right now is actually great. I think it's one of the top of the line AI models. It just came out. It's one of the newest. So yes, it's the best or one of the best. It's on par with the best. But if OpenAI comes out with a killer model or Grok comes out with a killer model from XAI or Anthropoc comes out with a killer model that beats it, maybe Google's like scrambling to try to catch up for a month or two.

6:42Do you really want to use like the second best model for a couple months while you're waiting for Google to get around and try to make their search a little bit better? I think Perplexity has a really big competitive advantage and the fact that you can switch between models. It's kind of like what I'm doing with my startup, AIbox.ai, where I let you chat with over 40 different models. You can switch them out. There's new models all the time. Different models are better than others. And it's the same kind of concept. We're not really like a search engine like perplexity is. We're more for like what you'd use ChatGPT for tasks and kind of building documents and workflows and stuff.

7:11And we do audio and video, or sorry, audio and image and stuff, all kind of in the same chat. But it's the same concept. And I think that this is a competitive advantage. So when it comes to building an actual browser, I think perplexity, if they come up with something incredible, new, and creative, I think they can get a lot of market share. But I also would expect Google, Chrome, and probably Microsoft and everyone else that has a browser already to copy them if they have a great idea, which I think they probably do. So is this new browser good enough to spend$200 a month on? the only precedent that I see in the AI industry right now that is charging$200 a month, there's two things.

7:52Number one is Google's VO video generator. That's like, you know, it's obviously super expensive to generate videos. And number two is ChatGPT's operator. Anthropic has kind of a version of that. And Google has sort of a version of that. But really, I feel like if they're charging$200 a month, they better be doing something like chat gpt operator where it's completely doing something now that's where um that's where i think they're probably going with this new browser with their comment browser it's probably going to be a lot like chat gpt operator where i actually can complete tasks for you it says a browser for agentic search so you would assume agentic search means actually accomplishing things for you and if that's the case it's probably worth 200 if it's as good as chat gpt operator No, that's a great point.

8:39Yeah. If it can include some of those, yeah, agentic features, like you said, where it's doing stuff for you. I think, you know, I think this is really going to be something that companies use. If you think of, you know, is this similar to what ChatGPT is doing with their operator? It's going to replace employees eventually, you know, and that's an unfortunate, you know, consequence of all this. But I feel like with the spreadsheets and reports, this could be kind of their lane that they're using as well. Like, you know, creating a company's profit and loss sheet and graphs at the end of the year showing like here's where our money's going and being able to do all that with AI, even on a weekly or daily basis is really powerful and could replace like an entire position really at a company.

9:23So I feel like that if it's good, which I'm assuming it is, the spreadsheet and report generation tool will be really powerful for corporations. Yeah. So I think it's going to be good. That whole thing that they have is called Perplexity Labs. They do a bunch of really cool things in there. I think it's them trying to differentiate themselves and build like an interesting new tool, kind of like how ChatGPT has their GPTs. They have their canvas that can open up when you're talking and it's building a document. So all of these AI models beyond just a powerful LLM are trying to create like software around it.

10:04This is where Perplexia has excelled because they've traditionally leaned on other LLMs. And so, yeah, I think this is going to be interesting. Is it worth$200 a month? I don't know if it is today. Like I don't think I would pay$200 today personally for this. Because if you go to like their payment page and you go to their, you know, their$200 or their like their payments, they have a$20 a month plan, which is, it says 10 times as many citations in the answers. Okay, that's great, right? So like versus a free perplexity thing, it has all these citations. So it's pretty much fact checking everything and linking it back to sources, which is really good.

10:40You get the perplexity labs, which is good. It's kind of like their deep research and it builds powerful documents and reports and stuff like that. Also perplexity research. So I guess that's more like their deep research. Unlimited file and video uploads, or sorry, and photo uploads. This is kind of interesting because obviously that all costs a lot of money. They got to store that. Extended access to image generation. They have APIs to some of these image generators. And then everything else that you kind of expect. So that's their$20 a month. And I think that's got a lot of value to it. I think if you're interested in using a lot of AI models for search and stuff, definitely pay$20 a month for perplexity.

11:19Then on their$200 model, they say early access to comment, the agentic browser. If it's just like Google Chrome, like, like whatever, like, why would I want early access to this? But if it's chat GPT operator, yes. But when it says early access, I don't know if that means that you get it today or it's coming like early access whenever it comes out. So I would clarify that. And then unlimited access to perplexity labs. Again, you're already getting this for the$20 a month. I don't know how much more unlimited gets you or how crazy people get with that. And then you can use the advanced models like 03 Pro, Opus, you know, four or whatever.

11:58So like those are useful, but you could also just go pay$20 a month on Claude or OpenAI and get access to those. So I don't know if I pay the 200 for those, you know what I mean? It's kind of hard to upsell something that costs$20 somewhere else for 200. so I think their big play here is their browser and I think it's going to be a chat uh a chat operator competitor but until it's like fully launched I'm watching YouTube videos about how good it is I personally want to pay the$200 so do you think right now it's kind of more just like fanboys who love perplexity who are going to be signing off for it or or uh do you think people actually use the features enough to make it worth 200 I don't know who is maybe maybe yeah maybe if If you're a power user of Perplexity, then you'll sign up.

12:44They're not going to get a lot of signups until their browser actually launches and people find out if it's actually good or not. If it is good, this thing will fly like hotcakes because if it's an agent browser, that's really, really valuable. You can get a ton of work done. You can make money with it. It's very easy to justify that. Until it launches, I think not a lot of people will probably sign up for it. Totally. But anyway, so perplexity up until this point generated$34 million in revenue in 2024. And that's largely driven by their pro plan. So that's a pretty decent chunk of change, but they still burned$65 million in cash, it says.

13:24So they're still operating at a loss. So maybe this is an attempt of them to kind of boost some of that revenue. Not really sure, but I still am optimistic about what they have. and I'm excited to see what the Comet browser has to offer. Yeah, same, same. Very, very excited. I'm pumped about anyone pushing forward the new features and exciting stuff in AI. Hey, guys, listen, if you enjoyed the podcast today and if you learned anything new about perplexity or what's going on in the world of AI, hopefully we saved you$200 if you're about to go out and buy this thing, or maybe you already bought it and you think it's worth it and you think we're crazy.

14:03So I don't know. You tell us in the drop us a review. That's where we love to hear from you over on Apple or on Spotify. If you guys could leave us a review, it really helps out the podcast grow. Make sure to join the AI Hustle School community. Drop any questions, thoughts you have over there as well. We'd love to respond to you. There's a link to that in the description. Thanks so much, and we will catch you guys next time. If you've ever been in the market for a new home, you know home shopping can be a lot. There's so much you don't know and so much you need to know. What are the neighborhoods like?

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15:08Homes.com. We've done your homework. This episode sponsored by HeadShop. If your piece is killing the vibe, HeadShop has the upgrade your session deserves. From sleek bongs and dab rigs to grinders, papers, and vaporizers, HeadShop has the gear to make every session feel better. All in one place with fast shipping that makes upgrading easy. Go to HeadShop. That's H-E-A-D-S-H-O-P dot com. Spend$100 or more for free shipping and get the setup you'll actually be proud to put on the table. At HeadShop.com, your setup stops looking basic and starts looking like yours. HeadShop. H-E-A-D-S-H-O-P dot com.