Perplexity Pricing: Pro, Max, Teams and API Costs

Perplexity costs $0 to start, $20 a month for the plan most buyers need, and $200 a month at the top of the consumer ladder. Pro is $20 a month or $200 a year, Max is $200 a month or $2,000 a year 1, and workplace seats start at $40 a month or $400 a year per seat, with an Enterprise Max tier at $325 a seat per month 2 3. Developers pay on a separate meter: the Search API is $5 per 1,000 requests, and Sonar model tokens run $1 to $15 per million 4. Verified students and educators can get every Pro feature for $10 a month 5.

Free gets you three Pro searches a day

The free tier costs $0 and includes access to Perplexity's top AI models on limited weekly usage 6. The caps are concrete as of the vendor's September 2026 plan guide: 3 Pro Searches a day and 1 Research query a month 7. That is enough to learn the product and enough to outgrow it. Anyone whose research runs daily hits the wall inside a week, and the cheapest fix is the $20 tier.

What $20 Pro adds, and what $200 Max adds on top

The ladder reads best as a delta rather than five feature lists. Every plan, free included, carries the top models; what money buys is search volume, Computer credits, and organizational features.

• Pro, $20 a month or $200 a year 1, raises every limit and adds Perplexity Computer plus premium data sources like PitchBook; Pro Search moves from a daily cap to weekly limits, and Research queries move from 1 a month to monthly limits 6 7.
• Education Pro carries everything in Pro at $10 a month for verified students and educators, a 50 percent discount processed through SheerID 8 5.
• Max, $200 a month or $2,000 a year, adds maximum Computer usage with 10,000 monthly credits and 35,000 bonus credits, expert-level research, frontier AI models, and the highest usage limits and memory 9 6; Mashable's coverage prints the same $200 and $2,000 figures 10.
• Enterprise Pro, $40 a month or $400 a year per seat, adds seat management and internal knowledge search through shared spaces 7.
• Enterprise Max, $325 a seat per month, targets organizations that need advanced data security and collaboration tooling 2 3 1.

Every annual option is the same deal: two months free

Perplexity sells four annual prices and they share one shape. Pro falls from $240 paid monthly to $200; Max from $2,400 to $2,000; an Enterprise Pro seat from $480 to $400; an Enterprise Max seat from $3,900 to the $3,250 listed by third-party trackers 11 1. Each annual price is the monthly price times ten: two months free, a 16.7 percent discount, identical on every rung of the ladder. Perplexity's own billing FAQ prints the arithmetic for the Pro seat, calling it "a discount of approximately 16.7% versus monthly" billing 3. The company's enterprise onboarding guide labels the same $40 and $400 numbers a "20% discount" 2; the arithmetic supports 16.7, not 20, since $400 is 83.3 percent of $480. Whichever percentage a page prints, the price is the same ten months a year.

The API meters requests and tokens separately

Consumer plans bill seats; the API bills usage. The Search API charges $5.00 per 1,000 successful POST requests, one request may carry an array of up to five queries and still count as a single billing unit, invalid and rate-limited requests are not billed, and there are no token charges 4. Full batching drops the effective floor to $0.001 per query. The Sonar models, which generate answers rather than return links, bill twice:

• Token rates per million: Sonar $1 input / $1 output; Sonar Pro $3 / $15; Sonar Reasoning Pro $2 / $8; Sonar Deep Research $2 / $8 plus $2 for citation tokens, $3 for reasoning tokens, and $5 per 1,000 of the searches it runs on its own 4.
• Request fees per 1,000 requests scale with search context size: Sonar $5 low / $8 medium / $12 high, and Sonar Pro and Sonar Reasoning Pro $6 / $10 / $14; high context multiplies Sonar's request fee 2.4 times 4.
• Pro Search, the multi-step mode on Sonar Pro, charges $14 / $18 / $22 per 1,000 against the standard $6 / $10 / $14 4.
• The Agent API sells third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Z.AI, Moonshot AI, and NVIDIA at direct provider rates with no markup, plus tool charges: web_search $0.0025 an invocation, fetch_url $0.0005, people and finance search $0.005 each, and a sandbox at $0.03 per 20-minute session 4.
• Embeddings run $0.004 to $0.05 per million tokens by model 4.

What one request actually costs once you do the math

The rate card prices parts, and buyers need totals. A Sonar Pro request with 1,000 tokens in and 1,000 tokens out costs $0.003 for input, $0.015 for output, and a $0.006 request fee at low context, about 2.4 cents in total. The same request at high context costs $0.032, and in Pro Search mode at high context $0.040. Depth and multi-step search can raise a fixed-size request's price by two thirds without one extra token 4.

That metering sets a ceiling on what a search is worth. One Pro month, $20, buys 4,000 Search API requests, or up to 20,000 queries batched five to a request, but only about 830 generated Sonar Pro answers at the 2.4-cent floor. A grounded answer costs roughly five times a raw search, $0.024 against $0.005, and the $200 annual Pro plan converts to 40,000 raw searches at metered rates 6 1 4.

The API and the app are different products, so this is economics, not a shopping rule. A workload that needs fewer than 4,000 raw searches a month and no answer generation pays less metered than a $20 seat; anything heavier, or anything a person reads, belongs on the flat plans.

Which plan fits which reader

Free suits occasional lookups, with three Pro searches a day and one research query a month as the entire budget, the caps as of the vendor's September 2026 plan guide. Pro is the default for anyone past daily use, and it is where Perplexity Computer access starts; students and educators should verify for the $10 rate before paying $20. Max is a credits product for buyers who burn through Computer usage and want frontier models and expert research on tap. Enterprise Pro seats fit teams that need shared knowledge search and administration, and Enterprise Max seats add the security and collaboration layer on top. The API is for building Perplexity into your own product, where raw search is cheap and generated answers are the cost center. Model access is not the dividing line, since Free already includes the top models 6; search volume, Computer credits, and organizational features are. The cheapest rung that covers the limit you actually hit is the whole decision.

Verified September 2026 against Perplexity's pricing page, its help-center billing articles, and its API documentation, US billing. This page is maintained: when Perplexity reprices, the figures above and a dated change note update here. To test whether a higher tier pays for itself against your own usage, run the same break-even math with your numbers in ProvenBrief's AI subscription calculator 12.