They have been receiving a lot of hate on Reddit for a few weeks, since they started mass canceling Pro accounts. What seemed to be initially an attempt at preventing illegitimate accounts (aka those using coupons from grey market for instance) escalated into wavesof random accounts suspensions just for not having a credit card set, including legit ones that came as a package with ISP, bank accounts, etc.

Not only have there been those cancellations, but they’ve also been cutting back features in a lot of areas, especially in the Pro tier, and doing it pretty drastically without any notice. Honestly, I think that might be the bigger issue, particularly since many of the affected users are paying customers, and quite a few of them paid for a full year upfront.

Yes, this is a very poor way of handling the issue. It's not like those 1 year vouchers have been stollen from them, they have been handing those out like candies and now they realized it wasn't profitable, they back off without any consideration for their customers.

It's been pointed out on Reddit that this move was not even legal in most EU because they have not been able to point out which of their ToC has been infringed (their official motive for cancellation). I am tired of companies behaving like cowboys...

Oh, so I wasn't the only one to lose my pro subscription all of sudden. I thought it was weird because it was supposed to expire this summer, not now.

When better standalone LLMs got "web crawling skills" integrated, it pretty much destroyed the need to ever lean on PPLX again. Perplexity is actually not a bad product, but other services like ChatGPT and Claude can do it's best thing pretty good, and do other things much better.

One thing I noticed is that whatever harness PPLX wraps around the models, the output is noticeably lower quality in aggregate. I assume some kind of token compression being used before passing your query to a given model but to my knowledge that's never been proven or confirmed?

Anyways, I get the most value out of coding and PPLX has seemingly pivoted away from that. Probably a good play to not try and compete directly with Claude Code/Codex and find a better niche, but I am not sure who or what their market is. Lovely design, however.

It's still there. For Joe Shmoe, in terms of general purpose, ask it a question, LLM use, Perplexity is solidly in the following lineup, as I understand it:

- Perplexity: This one has been promoted on (insert general audience media skewing toward the older set) enough to be a household name still.

- ChatGPT: General people in some demographics (see immediately above) are averse to this, on account of negative publicity its parent company has received. (Still very strong popularity and positive sentiment in some demographics, though)

- Claude: Some semi-literates have glommed onto this one, possibly as a result of its more recent success among the developer set.

- Grok: People can be either for or against, based on how they feel about its owning company and its ownership; no more need be said

- Gemini: Again, if you are in the universe of its owning company (or decidedly not), the draw (or repulsion) can be strong here.

For general LLM use, the above are all about the same. To be clear, this is just me shooting from the hip for how each offering might be viewed. IMO, it's not a bad idea to submit the same input to each and see how they compare, if one is so inclined.

Funny how you didn't even mention MS Copilot, which many of my friends who work for big corporations seem to have been forced to use at work, and as a consequence, also for personal use.

Oh yeah, that is funny. Thanks for adding it; I thought I was missing at least one major one!

- Copilot: Great at finding and discussing docs, conversations, and other work items that it is connected to. For everything else, it seems somehow less smart than the others (YMMV).

Emphasis on the YMMV, obviously. Maybe my impression is colored by a small number of unlucky, less than stellar experiences (comparatively speaking).