Perplexity announced that its “Buy with Pro” agentic shopping experience, which originally launched last November exclusively for paid subscribers, will now be free for all US users across its desktop app and website, with iOS and the Comet browser following in the weeks ahead.
When Buy with Pro rolled out in 2024, it was positioned as a subscription-only feature that let Pro and Max users buy products with one click, get more personalized recommendations, and benefit from merchant integrations that improved visibility in search results. Now the company is removing the paywall entirely and bringing its shopping capabilities to all users — likely in response to ChatGPT's launch of Instant Checkout, which is free for everyone.
That refresh includes better shopping-intent detection, product cards with images and on-demand descriptions, and a checkout flow powered by PayPal, which will serve as the merchant of record and extend its buyer-protection policies to purchases made through Perplexity.
Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer, told CNBC:
“The agentic part is the seamless purchase right from the answer. Most people want to still do their own research. They want that streamlined and simplified, and so that’s the part that is agentic in this launch.”
Perplexity plans to roll out the free features the week of Thanksgiving, coinciding with PayPal’s own holiday promotion that will offer one-time cashback through its Instant Buy merchants between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Earlier this month I reported that Amazon was suing Perplexity over its Comet browser disguising itself as a Chrome browser so that it could shop autonomously on Amazon.com, which Amazon explicitly prohibits. If you missed that story, you should give it a read because it's an important one. The outcome of the lawsuit will have a major impact on the agentic commerce market in regards to what permissions are necessary for AI to shop on your behalf.
