Perplexity's New AI "Teammates" Can Run Your Daily Ops for $200 a Month — Do the Math First

Most AI tools sit and wait for you to type. Perplexity's new "Teammates," announced November 4, are built to do the opposite: you give one a standing job — chase vendor paperwork, summarize yesterday's complaints, watch competitor pricing — and it keeps working on it for weeks, checking in with you on Slack when it needs a decision.

For a small business owner wearing five hats, that's an appealing pitch. But the real cost isn't just the $200 subscription. It's a meter that runs every time the agent works. Here's what Teammates do, what they actually cost, and how to test one without a surprise bill.

What a Perplexity Teammate Is

A Teammate is an AI agent with a permanent role. You name it, connect the tools it needs — Slack, Gmail, GitHub and others — describe the work, and assign it to a project. It plans tasks, can spin up additional agents, checks results and hands finished work back to you for review. Goals, task history and shared files carry over between assignments, so each job builds on the last.

Teammates sit on top of Perplexity Computer, the company's cloud agent, and use the same projects, skills and memory. The difference is duration: a Computer session ends when the task ends, while a Teammate keeps watching your connected tools and sending updates until you turn it off. Because it runs in Perplexity's cloud, it keeps working when your laptop is closed.

The Jobs Perplexity Is Pitching to Small Businesses

Perplexity's own example roles are aimed squarely at operations and marketing, not just developers:

• Marketing: manages social posts, email, ads and SEO; builds new ads based on what performs; watches competitor promotions and suggests a response when a rival changes prices.
• Sales: spots opportunities in inquiries, past purchases and stalled conversations; drafts outreach and quotes; follows up on replies.
• Customer support: reads the previous day's complaints each morning, summarizes trends, flags cases that need a personal reply from the owner and drafts those replies.
• Operations: tracks deadlines, checklists, vendors and paperwork, and chases missing items once a deadline is 72 hours away.

Teammates learn from corrections. Tell an operations Teammate once that a supplier needs two weeks' notice, and it should factor that into future schedules.

What It Costs: The Subscription Is Only the Start

Teammates are available only on Perplexity's Max plan: $200 a month, or $2,000 a year (about $167 a month). Pro subscribers have to upgrade, and Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max accounts don't get Teammates by default. Perplexity calls it a research preview, web-only for now, with mobile and desktop apps planned later.

The bigger number is usage. According to Perplexity's credits documentation, as summarized by tech outlet i-SCOOP:

• Max includes 10,000 credits a month, plus a one-time 35,000-credit sign-up bonus
• 100 credits = $1, so the monthly allowance is worth $100 of agent work
• Extra credits cost the same rate
• The default spending cap is $200 a month, and it can be raised to $5,000
• Unused monthly credits expire on your billing date

Perplexity's own reference values per task:

• Quick fact or definition: 15–70 credits ($0.15–$0.70)
• Multi-step research report: 350–950 credits ($3.50–$9.50)
• Data dashboard: 2,400–9,800 credits ($24–$98)
• Entire app or multi-day build: 15,000+ credits ($150+)

A quick reality check

Say you want a Teammate to summarize a Slack channel every weekday morning — roughly 22 runs a month. If each run is a "quick fact," that's 330 to 1,540 credits. If each run behaves more like a small research report because it reads linked documents too, i-SCOOP's math puts it at 7,700 to 20,900 credits — potentially double your monthly allowance from one daily task. Perplexity hasn't published typical consumption figures for Teammates, only that complex, parallel or frequent work uses more.

Translation: a busy marketing Teammate checking ads, competitors and reviews several times a day could cost well beyond $200 a month. Track it the way you would any variable expense on your profit and loss statement.

Controls Owners Should Know About

• Its own sandbox: Each Teammate runs on its own cloud computer with its own browser and sessions. You can watch, take over or redirect it mid-task.
• Your permissions, not more: It gets the access you grant — specific Slack channels, specific repositories. Saved credentials are encrypted, and Perplexity says the agent can't read them directly.
• Approvals: You decide what needs your sign-off before it acts.
• Credit stops: When credits run out, running tasks pause until you buy more or your allowance renews.

One outside risk: more websites are blocking AI agents. Amazon, for example, is in an ongoing lawsuit with Perplexity over its Comet browser agent. Expect some web tasks to stall when a site turns the agent away.

How It Stacks Up Against Other Always-On Agents

Perplexity isn't alone. OpenAI's "dots" agents are available on ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium. Microsoft's Copilot Cowork targets companies with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses at $30 per user plus usage. Anthropic has a similar always-on assistant for Claude subscribers in waitlist testing. What sets Perplexity apart, for now, is the combination of a dedicated computer per agent, multiple Teammates per person with standing roles, and agents that can hand work to each other.

If your business already lives in Microsoft 365, Copilot may be the simpler fit. If your work runs through Slack, Gmail and the open web, Teammates is worth a look.

Agent or Hire? Frame the Decision Honestly

A $200-plus monthly agent is cheaper than a part-time assistant — but it isn't a substitute for judgment, and you're still responsible for everything it sends. Many owners will find the best use is offloading the repetitive slice of a job so a person (or you) can focus on the rest. If you're weighing an agent against bringing on outside help, our guide on independent contractor vs. employee covers the human side of that decision.

How to Test a Teammate Without Getting Burned

1. Pick one bounded job. Clear input, clear output, fixed schedule — for example, "every morning, summarize yesterday's support emails into five bullets."
2. Grant the minimum access. One Slack channel, one inbox label. No payment methods, no customer databases on day one.
3. Set the spending cap first at an amount you're comfortable losing, and leave auto-refill off.
4. Require approval on anything outbound — emails, posts, quotes, contract changes — for at least the first month.
5. Measure after 30 days: tasks done right, times you had to step in, and credits spent. That tells you whether a second Teammate is worth it.

The Bottom Line

Perplexity Teammates are one of the clearest signs yet that AI is moving from answering questions to owning ongoing work — and the roles Perplexity is pitching are exactly the chores that eat a small business owner's week. Just treat it like a new hire on a usage-based contract: start small, cap the spend, review its output, and expand only when the numbers prove it's earning its keep.

Photo by James McKinven on Unsplash