Perplexity

On a single day in February 2026, Perplexity cut three Pro quotas at once, and our data flags all three as silent: Deep Research fell from roughly 500 queries a day to about 20 a month (a ~95% reduction the company framed as 'adjusting to allocate more compute per session'), Labs was halved from 50 to 25 monthly, and previously unlimited file uploads were capped at 50 per week. That is the quiet side of a tool whose loud moves all point the other way — a $200 Max tier in July 2025 with uncapped Labs and Research, and the Comet browser lifted out from behind the Max gate and made free worldwide in October 2025. A May 2026 crackdown throttled promo-code Pro accounts to ~100 advanced queries a week, and a mid-February model change routed Deep Research through Claude Opus 4.6. What emerges is a gap between headline generosity and the fine print of the plan you already pay for: the top tier gets richer while mid-tier Pro is trimmed without notice. Budget for the advertised limits to move under you, and treat Deep Research volume especially as something that can be redefined overnight rather than a stable entitlement.