Perplexity users report Comet gutted as agentic browsing moves behind Computer credits

Agentic browsing moved behind a credit meter

A roundup published on dev.to on 6 September collects a week of subscriber complaints against Perplexity, drawn from Reddit threads on r/perplexity_ai that the author says were read verbatim on the live posts. The central claim is that features included in paid plans were quietly removed or pushed behind a second, credit-based product.

The loudest complaint concerns Comet, the company's agentic browser. In a 20 August thread titled "Comet has been gutted", user ddd27ddd wrote that using the agentic browser now requires Perplexity Computer and its expensive credits, and that the change was a major disruption to their workflows. As the roundup frames it, the objection is not that a feature ceased to exist but that something already paid for was re-metered: the subscription price stayed the same while the product behind it shrank in the direction of a paid add-on.

A string of quieter removals

Users also reported smaller subtractions in the web app that are easy to miss. User sho-ne noted that Perplexity no longer indicates which model produced an answer and that answers can no longer be removed. The model label matters more than it sounds, the roundup argues, because model choice is a large part of what a multi-model subscription sells. In the same thread, user Powerful-Cheek-6677 did the value arithmetic out loud, describing a $200 plan that now amounts to a search engine with 10,000 monthly credits, with most connectors shifted into Computer.

Model churn fed the same feeling. RealPlatypus8041, writing on 21 August under the heading "Removing Gemini 3.1 pro was the last straw", said image-generation capacity had fallen from never running out to roughly five images a week, and that both GPT 5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro had been pulled. Not everyone read the swaps as downgrades: user Similar_Pension_4233 countered that the replacement, "Flash 3.7 thinking", beats 3.1 Pro on nearly all tasks and called it an upgrade. The roundup flags this as a genuine dispute, but notes the underlying complaint is about a menu changing after payment, without notice.

Upsells, missing credits and a difficult exit

What turned annoyance into anger, according to the roundup, was the sense of being steered toward Computer inside a plan people already pay for. A thread on 22 August asking Perplexity to "stop begging us to use perplexity computer" passed a hundred upvotes; in its comments, user Early_Alternative211 said Computer is set by default in project spaces, calling it "an intrusive ad, despite having a paid sub". One commenter, Torodaddy, theorised that Perplexity now favours enterprise accounts and is making individual plans progressively less pleasant — a theory the roundup explicitly declines to treat as documented fact.

The hardest complaints to dismiss involve billing. User AcidSadBoy reported paying for Max on 17 August and receiving none of the 10,000 monthly Computer credits the plan promises; support reportedly confirmed the grant was not being displayed, then spent a week investigating without a fix or refund. Separately, user DozePila described trying to cancel before a promotional year converted into a paid charge, only to be locked out by SMS verification tied to a phone number they no longer had, with human support never following up.

A parallel complaint at OpenAI

The pattern is not unique to Perplexity. On 24 August in r/ChatGPT, user DaBobcat reported buying ChatGPT Pro for an image project on the strength of the pricing page's promise of "unlimited and faster image creation", then hitting a rate limit after a few hundred images and contacting support.

Why it matters

The story the roundup tells is one of quiet re-pricing: pricing pages stay static while included features migrate to credit meters and add-ons, making a flat plan behave like a metered one. That is hard to evaluate before subscribing and harder to audit afterwards, especially when the label telling you which model answered disappears too. The second failure mode is operational rather than technical — credits that never arrive, support queues that stall when money is owed back, and cancellations blocked by login requirements. These are the parts of a product a company fully controls, which is what makes their failure a choice rather than a growing pain. The dev.io post is careful to present individual experiences rather than verdicts and includes no company response, so the accounts remain one-sided — but the specificity of dates, amounts and plan tiers is exactly what makes the pattern worth watching beyond a single vendor.