Some users claim Perplexity Pro plan automatically downgraded, others getting responses from free models only

People who held annual Perplexity Pro subscriptions through promotional orders are now reporting that their subscription has been downgraded automatically. These subscribers lost premium features overnight, with no warning. For some others, they’re only getting responses from the free set of models, despite being shown ‘Perplexity Pro’ in the app or website.

Billing pages still list that the Pro subscription is active. However, the sidebar and new chat screens show free-tier prompts, attempting to make people purchase the Pro subscription. Support appears unhelpful, since the support bots simply claim that these users never purchased Pro. They ignore proof of earlier premium model usage, leaving affected people rather frustrated and with no answers.

There were several promotional offers for Perplexity Pro over the past year. We’ve had it from companies like Airtel, Revolut, Samsung, Telkomsel, and more. While people expected a year of free access after activation, it appears that Perplexity decided to make the experience worse. Many people report perfect performance the previous night, before the sudden change.

The system intentionally pushes accounts to basic models, and affected users don’t even get a choice for advanced Claude or Gemini models. Even the query limits and features completely drop to free-tier levels.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen controversies around Perplexity Pro. A few months ago, users began receiving responses from fallback (free) models, despite being supposedly Pro users. The CEO even responded to this, claiming it’s a mere engineering bug. However, for the recent wave of complaints, we haven’t seen any response from Perplexity.

There are some fixes you can try, such as updating the billing address on the account page. This does restore the subscription for some people. Alternatively, you can try contacting the company that gave you the offer and ask them for a fresh activation code. The exact process varies depending on the company you’ve used to claim the offer. I had this issue myself, and Perplexity Support actually replied with steps on how I could fix it. You can try it; the details are in the image attached below.

It’s not just Perplexity under fire recently, but Gemini was allegedly told to “think less,” and Google might be secretly capping it. You can read all about that here.

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