I Wasn't Going to Pay for Perplexity Pro... Until I Used It for 10 Days

I have been using Perplexity Pro for 10 days.

I wasn’t planning to buy it. I am quite oversubscribed at the moment, and Perplexity wasn’t gonna make it to the list.

And then I heard some amazing news: Airtel, one of India's largest telecom providers, announced a partnership with Perplexity AI in July 2025 to offer a free one-year Perplexity Pro subscription.

The value of a one-year subscription is $200, or INR 17,000. Airtel has 360 million customers across mobile, broadband, and DTH services.

This obviously led to some theories online.

MediaNama's founder, Nikhil Pahwa, noted this could be part of a "guerrilla marketing" push, aiming to hook users on premium features like advanced AI models and unlimited searches.

One Reddit thread claims Perplexity is gearing up for an acquisition, and more MAU = more leverage in the negotiation.

Either way, I have been using Perplexity Pro for 10 days and I won't say I'm amazed, but it has improved my life in some ways:

1: Context retention.

Earlier, every follow-up question in an existing chat was treated like a new question. I hate having to rewrite the context every single time.

Eg: I asked Perplexity to share straps for Apple Watch Series 10.

The response reminded me that I forgot to mention 'India' in my prompt. So I hurriedly typed 'I am in India'.

On the free plan, it used to treat 'I am in India' as a separate command, and start giving me lists of things to do in India.

On the Pro plan, it understands the context, and narrows the search for Watch 10 straps to Indian e-commerce marketplaces.

2: Deep Research reports

I have been using Perplexity’s Research mode to prepare for important client calls and catch up on important news.

Like this ‘n8n for HR’ report I got made in preparation for a call with the national head of HR of a company.

Or when I missed catching up on all the news about the latest ChatGPT Agent launch.

The fact that these reports are real-time makes them very valuable for me.

3: Solid Reddit Summarizer

We’ve all appended our google searches with ‘Reddit’. You get a bunch of Reddit threads, go through them, find your answer.

But Perplexity Pro nicely tabulates the findings, shares edge cases, and just generally does a very good job at summarizing the collective Reddit answers when you don’t want to spend too much time.

4: Set Sources for Search

This is Google Site Search on STEROIDS. I absolutely adore this feature.

Depending on the context, you can search academic papers, social websites, SEC filings, or the entire internet.

Another way to search real-time, but within some parameters, is to use Perplexity Spaces.

5: Perplexity Spaces

Instead of searching the entire web, create a new ‘Space’ and specify the websites you trust.

Let's say you're researching AI startups and want to focus only on credible tech journalism sources. Under ‘sources’, you can add techcrunch.com, venturebeat.com, theverge.com, wired.com, etc. and ask your questions.