Perplexity throttles PRO subscribers without prior notice

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Background

Up to the event, Perplexity had offered:

• Unlimited queries, this is the common query, the action of writing a query and pressing send;
• 600 daily Deep Research queries, which is the mode that most distinguishes the AI platform. It takes 3-5 minutes for the answer, acting like an agent;
• 50 Labs queries, which takes around 10 minutes to complete the iterations, and this is a mode to generate outputs that are entire webpages/apps;
• Unlimited file uploads. When making queries, users can attach files to have them analyzed.

Deep Research is one of the main reasons why customers subscribes to the PRO plan, and file uploads are important, particularly for research/students use.

There is no published limit, the values are only shown on the phone app when creating queries, and were available on the webapp before the change, but the new UI after the change has hidden these values from the browser version.

The limit has coincided with the announcement of a new Deep Search, more powerful, based on Opus 4.5.

Incident

Perplexity has deliberately reduced monthly and daily queries for Pro users without prior notice for all their Pro user base. The new limits are the followings:

• Queries: Unlimited -> 200/week
• Deep Research: 600/day -> 20/month
• Labs: 50/month -> 25/month
• File uploads: unlimited -> 50/week

Since the new web UI didn't show the new limits and no announcement has been made, users have exhausted their monthly allowance in less than a day, having now to wait 1.5 days before they could make another query, similar for attachments to queries. This is notably important for users that renew monthly, and a break of trust for annual subscribers, which mid-term have found themselves with a service notably different from the one they've subscribed to.

The usage of a Deep research or Labs query, gets deducted from the normal queries, further reducing their weekly cap.

Some users report, that also the use of Perplexity's browser "Comet", deducts queries during use, reducing the queries even more.

One user got muted and received a 90 days warn for posting a link to this wiki article, it was valuated non-constructive feedback and eliminated.

Comparison between queries limits before and after the 2026-02-05 incident.

Consumers response

Users have started opening formal complaints on Perplexity's Discord server, and on others of their social media.

Some users have asked for a refund a couple of days after the annual subscription, saying that this is not the service promoted at the time of subscription, but Perplexity has denied the refund.

Some users have cancelled their subscription.

One user has started a petition on change.org, over 80 people have signed on the first day. Perplexity is actively removing the petition link whenever it gets posted on the server.

Users are inciting (with a step-by-step guide) to dispute the Terms of Service via legal means, asking the resolution to be the restoration of the original limits as at the time of the yearly contract was stipulated. The proposed ways to enforce this dispute for people in the USA are:

• State Attorney General
• Federal Trade Commission
• Better Business Bureau

Perplexity response

There has been no official communication, but one of the moderators of the Discord server has expressed their opinion on why this has happened:

"Bottom line: Less wasteful querying, More intentional AI use, Healthier infrastructure, Lower environmental load. That’s not regression. That’s responsible evolution."

There are reports of bans on Perplexity's Discord server under the pretext of violating Terms of Service and post deletion on Reddit