Should I buy Perplexity Pro?

I have been on somewhat of an AI drive of late. I have been trying to not just use AI in the sense that people are using as a chatbot, but I'm using AI to augment my work, to speed up my comprehension, make things easier to digest. So I've been in quite a frenzy of late, finding new ways of enhancing my daily workflow of Threat Intelligence or summarising long reports. I am only scratching the surface of what is technically possible to augment my work with GenAI, and that will likely get more interesting if the rumours are true.

One area that, I think, is going to heat up soon is Search. It has already started with Google trying to add AI search into their search index with some, intriguing results. There are others that are moving to use GenAI to augment what the user might be interested in, or even to enhance the types of websites that appear in the search results. Kagi, Perplexity and even OpenAI are dipping their toe into the massive market that is essentially owned by Google. Remember Google is an advertising company not anything else. These other products are not showing advertisements (it is unknown about OpenAI I have not used it but on the waiting list!) they are providing information to the searcher. That is what search engines should be, provide information and useful websites.

Enter Perplexity

Perplexity had some recent bad press, and as the old saying goes, “No such thing as bad publicity”. Which made me re-think if I should give my hard-earned cash to yet another AI company.

I have used Perplexity on and off for the last few months. I was given a three-month trial because I was also an Eleven Labs customer. Not only that, but I used it quite extensively, their models and API were handy. I integrated these into a few of my automations, as their API can access the Internet and are the same (I think) as their main product on the web.

The main thing that got me was the price, the price of their annual product is $200USD. Which is not too much different than ChatGPT Plus or Anthropic, but my main worry is, would it replace my main search engine, Kagi? So I set out to try the free version of their search, which allows five pro searches every four hours. Which for me is plenty to try to decide if I actually need the pro version.

Now the pro version comes with other things besides the full pro search. Upping your five searches per four hours to 300 per month, access to more powerful models to summarise searches, analyse files and images as well as $5USD “free” credit for access to their API each month, but to name a few.

These extras are interesting to me as I like to vary the outputs I can get across the AI stack purely because it helps see the differences and the variance of the LLMs.

But I am still not convinced pro is for me

So how do I figure this out? I started to think about the use cases and viewed how many searches I do in my search engine of choice, Kagi. At the time of writing my search count is 365 this month (July 25th to Aug 25th 2024). That is around 13 searches a day across all my devices. The good thing is Kagi does not keep the searches (unlike Google and Perplexity) so I can’t tell you what type of searches Perplexity could be used for. But knowing that I was embarking on this discovery piece, I started thinking specifically about the searches I would be doing, it is for a search engine or for an answer engine.

Let’s answer

So when I needed to understand something going forward in the last month, I asked myself:

1. What is the answer I am looking for?
2. Is it easier to just ask rather than make a search statement?

So point one, am I looking for a specific answer to my query, i.e. I am curious about something or trying to address a problem. Or, am I looking for results to look though to find what I am looking for. It is sometimes difficult to see, so I end up in Kagi, then move to Perplexity when I get annoyed at the search results.

Point two is a little more nuanced. Similar to the above but not the same, do I start with a direct question that needs answering or do I not know yet?

Here is an example, in perplexity I asked:

In Kagi:

Now, I could have the same question in Perplexity, but it was not my first go to. My first stop was the search engine, I had a question to ask in both instances, but I wanted to find the answer myself, hence the Kagi search.

From the outside looking in you may be wondering what the difference is, well, the difference is personal preference. I am more often not in a web browser that takes my query to Kagi than to Perplexity. Although I can set it as my default.

The $200 a year question

So, am I going to get Perplexity Pro? Not right now, I can’t quite justify the cost, while access to the other models is interesting, I already have access to them by other means, and they also have access to search results. So I will keep an eye on things and I might invest in it another time.