Allen Institute for AI · Search
AI-powered academic search engine that uses NLP to find relevant research papers and extract key information.
Pricing
Free
Trust 88
Search
Perplexity
AI-powered answer engine that searches the web and provides cited, conversational answers to complex questions.
What’s good
- Always cites sources
- Real-time information
- Clean interface
Where it falls down
- Can misinterpret sources
- Pro required for best models
- Occasional hallucinations
Features
Web search
Citations
Follow-up questions
Collections
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Cost against price
Perplexity costs $20. What does it cost to run?
We do not know which model Perplexity runs on, so here is the range. One seat doing the light workload, on the cheapest, middlemost and dearest models in the index.
| If it runs on | Model | Model cost | Left of $20 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheapest priced model | Qwen 3.7 Flash | $0.13 | $20 (99%) |
| Middle of the range | Gemini 3.1 Pro | $11 | $9.44 (47%) |
| Dearest priced model | Claude Fable 5 | $48 | $-28.00 (-140%) |
A model, not an audit. This is what the intelligence would cost at that shape of work, not what Perplexity pays: we do not know its model, its real usage or what it has negotiated, and the figures exclude caching, batching and volume discounts. What the gap is worth is the product, and that is the thing to judge.
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