Perplexity throttles PRO subscribers without prior notice

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Background

Up to the event, Perplexity had offered 600 daily Deep Research queries, which is the model that most distinguished the AI platform. It takes 3-5 minutes for the answer, acting like an agent, and 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,

Deep Research is one of the main reasons why customers subscribes to the PRO plan.

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 queries for Pro users without prior notice for all their Pro user base. The new limits are the followings:

• Deep Research: 600/day -> 20/month
• Labs: 50/month -> 25/month

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

Screenshot of queries limits before and after.

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 other of their socials.

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 cancels 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 gets posted on the server.

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