Perplexity Max sells credits; open-source Kortix bills computer time

Max is Perplexity's top consumer tier. It costs $200 a month, or $2,000 a year. The annual option is sold only in the web app (Perplexity's Max page), where it comes to $167 a month (pricing page).

Inside is 10,000 Computer credits a month, plus a one-time 35,000-credit bonus that expires in about 30 days. Perplexity prices credits at 100 to the dollar, so the allowance is $100 of metered work. It pays for Computer alone. Ask searches, Comet in Search mode and the models you pick do not touch it. Computer tasks do, and Comet's Work mode runs Computer underneath (how credits work).

Three things sit outside the $200. Unused monthly credits do not roll over. Auto-refill stays off until you switch it on, and on Max it fires at 2,500 credits. Credit purchases also sit under a spending cap of $200 a billing period by default, adjustable to $5,000. The rest of the $200 buys model access: frontier models, Comet's Max Assistant, Brain in research preview, priority support.

Take a month of 300 Computer tasks at 100 credits each. That is ten tasks a day across 30 days: two research reports, a couple of document builds, a dashboard, some smaller jobs. An ordinary month for one person running agent work.

It comes to 30,000 credits, or $300 of metered work. The plan covers 10,000. The other 20,000 cost $200, which lands on the default spending cap, so the month totals $400. At ten tasks a day the allowance is gone by day ten.

A hundred credits a task is the conservative end of Perplexity's own figures. Its help center prices a multi-step research report at 350 to 950 credits. At that size the month's allowance buys 10 to 28 reports, and a heavier mix reaches the cap sooner. The month prints line by line from your own task count, and each rate sits next to the page it was read from. The pricing breakdown walks the plans one at a time, including why Pro is a different sum: weekly Computer usage and a one-time 4,000-credit grant replace the monthly balance.

Running out is not an outage. Active tasks pause and resume when credits arrive. New tasks stay blocked until the balance clears zero.

Kortix meters the cloud computer the tasks run on. One credit is $0.01. The default computer, 2 vCPU with 4 GB of RAM and 20 GB of storage, draws about 11 credits an hour, $0.108 (Kortix, checked October 2026). It bills per second at $0.0324 per vCPU-hour, $0.0108 per GB-hour and $0.0526 per GB-month of storage. A stopped computer costs nothing.

So $200 a month buys 20,000 credits, which comes to about 1,830 agent-computer hours. The free tier is 500 credits a month and one project, roughly 45 hours of the same computer.

Run the same 300 tasks at 12 minutes each and you have 60 agent-computer hours: $6.48 of metered work. The 500 free credits cover $5 of it, about 45 of the 60 hours, and the rest runs on the Credits plan, which is 5,000 credits from $50 a month, so the month totals $50.00, which is what the calculator prints once the free tier is outgrown. A task that runs longer costs more. A month where the work stops early costs less. Models are separate. Model usage is free to $1,000 a month, then 5% of the provider's price comes out of credits, or you connect a ChatGPT subscription and spend none.

A Perplexity balance is personal to the account. It cannot be transferred, and it expires at each billing date, so an idle week is allowance you paid for and cannot use. Kortix credits roll over one month, and the meter stops with the computer, so a quiet week costs nothing.

Self-hosting is the other difference. Self-host is free, so the lines left on the bill are the server you keep and the model calls your agents make. The agents, their grants and the company memory are files in a git repo you host, so the bill sits next to the configuration it pays for.

Max is the better purchase in three situations, and all three are common. You want frontier models bundled with no key to manage. You use Computer a few times a week, and the model access is most of the value. Nobody on the team wants to run a deployment, so one subscription from one vendor is worth the premium. The cap and the pause also mean the worst case is a known number.