Perplexity free versus Pro: what changes when you upgrade in 2025
- Graziano Stefanelli
- Aug 16
- 2 min read
Perplexity’s platform is designed to handle both quick factual lookups and extended, multi-step research sessions. While its free tier gives casual users a capable AI search experience, the Pro subscription expands the service into a high-capacity research environment with premium models, advanced tools, and greater flexibility.
The Pro plan removes the biggest limits of the free tier.
Free accounts include five Pro Searches per day, where each Pro Search uses a premium model in deep search mode to pull from more live sources. Standard searches remain unlimited, but they are processed by the default Perplexity model with fewer retrieval layers. Upgrading to Pro increases the allowance to over 300 Pro Searches daily, making it possible to run continuous, in-depth research without hitting the quota ceiling.
Feature | Free tier | Pro tier |
Daily Pro Searches | 5 | 300+ |
Standard searches | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Model retrieval depth | Basic | Extended |
Pro subscribers gain access to premium AI models and image generation.
The free tier is locked to Perplexity’s default model. The Pro tier unlocks GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and other specialist models. This allows one-click switching between models depending on the task—whether it’s reasoning-heavy, creative, or analytical. Pro also introduces image generation directly within the chat interface, supporting quick visual content creation without leaving the platform.
Feature | Free tier | Pro tier |
Default model | ✓ | ✓ |
GPT-4o | — | ✓ |
Claude 3 family | — | ✓ |
Image generation | — | ✓ |
Model switching in chat | — | ✓ |
File handling becomes unlimited for Pro users.
On the free plan, file uploads are restricted to excerpts or limited document lengths. Pro removes these constraints, allowing unlimited uploads of PDFs, images, CSVs, and spreadsheets. This makes it possible to query full documents or datasets in one go. The assistant can summarise, transform, or cross-reference file contents, and in structured data, it can process and analyse rows directly. Pro also enables the creation of Pages—shareable, interactive reports generated from your research.
The pricing structure is straightforward.
Plan type | Price (monthly) | Price (annual) | Included API credits |
Free | $0 | — | — |
Pro (individual) | $20 | $200 | $5/month equivalent |
Enterprise Pro | $40/seat | — | Higher rate limits |
The Pro plan also occasionally includes promotional offers, such as partner bundles with other services.
Enterprise and team options add governance features.
For organisations, Enterprise Pro includes all Pro benefits plus seat management, higher rate limits, and compliance tooling for regulated data environments. These features make Perplexity suitable for collaborative, high-volume research workflows in business settings.
Deciding whether to upgrade depends on your workload.
If you rarely exceed five deep searches a day and don’t require premium models, the free plan provides strong baseline functionality. However, if your work involves long-form research, frequent retrieval-intensive queries, or file-based analysis, the Pro plan eliminates quotas and opens access to higher-quality models, richer outputs, and publishing tools. For power users, these changes transform Perplexity from a fast AI answer engine into a full research and content-production platform.
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