Perplexity just gave paying Comet subscribers another huge reason to abandon the browser

Perplexity might be testing the patience of its users without even realizing it. It looks like the handful of folks who still use Comet on their desktops have noticed that the “Control browser” feature included with their Perplexity Pro subscriptions has been stripped away.

Bear in mind that this was one of the biggest selling points of the browser when it launched. Now the company has quietly tucked the feature behind Perplexity Computer credits. So not only are users now paying for their Perplexity Pro subscriptions, but they are also expected to top up their accounts with credits just to use the browser’s main feature set.

The frustration within the community has already been growing for a while. I personally canceled my plans to renew my yearly subscription to Perplexity Pro a couple of months ago because I felt the company had abandoned Comet on desktop. Before that, I even wrote about why I felt the browser might be on its last legs and face the same fate as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas browser.

With Perplexity yanking away browser control and hiding it behind yet another paywall, it’s clear that the company may have bitten off more than it can chew with Comet.

The company may have underestimated the costs of maintaining a browser, and the compute it takes to give millions of users access to its AI-powered browser control. As a result, they’ve decided to get users to pay as they go instead of giving them access as part of their regular subscription to the Perplexity platform.

We at PiunikaWeb have not yet found any official documentation on the change, but it isn’t surprising. The company has been silent on developments related to Comet for several months.

Upon checking Comet myself, I found that the “Control browser” option is now located in the Computer features section in the browser’s AI sidebar. You won’t be able to use it unless you have Computer credits in your account.

A fresh Pro subscription gives you a one-time bundle of 4,000 credits. That might seem like a lot, but it will run out in just a few days even with light Computer use. You won’t get any further credits with your monthly or yearly subscription after you run out of the 4,000 bonus credits.

Perplexity Max subscribers, on the other hand, get a one-time bonus of 35,000 credits. Plus, they get 10,000 credits every month as part of the subscription package.

One slight misconception in some threads on Reddit is that Comet has completely gotten rid of the browser control feature. But that’s not true. It’s still there, but you need to purchase Computer credits to use it, as noted above.

Locking an existing browser tool behind a meter that can burn through credits quickly defeats the whole point of using Comet in the first place. Many users are already talking about jumping ship to extensions from Claude or ChatGPT that handle web tasks without charging extra fees.

If you too want to explore other options, I’ve narrowed the best AI browsers right now down to just two options. You can check that out here.

If Perplexity wanted to convince people to stick with Comet, pulling features out of paid subscriptions is certainly an interesting way to go about it. We’ll update the article if there are any further details about the change surface.

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