‘Comet Has Been Gutted’: A Week of Paid AI Features Quietly Disappearing

For a year the loudest complaints in consumer AI have been about the meter: vanishing limits, tokens burning faster than the pricing page implied, a flat plan quietly behaving like a taxi fare. This week the grievance shifted one notch sideways, from “you’re metering what I paid for” to something blunter: you’re taking away what I paid for. Features removed. Browsers paywalled. Favourite models pulled. And, in the sharpest cases, a plan billed for credits that never arrived. The epicentre was Perplexity, but the pattern rhymed elsewhere. Quotes sourced from: Reddit (r/perplexity_ai and r/ChatGPT). Every quote below was read verbatim on the live thread and is listed with its username, subreddit and the thread’s date and permalink in the Sources section. We widened the window to the past week, because a two-day snapshot was thin, and we left out comments that were really adverts for rival tools. As always we quote experiences, not verdicts — a forum post is one user’s account — and what makes this batch worth reading isn’t volume; it’s that the complaints are specific enough to check. “Comet has been gutted”: a feature paywalled overnight The clearest single grievance was about Comet, Perplexity’s agentic browser, which many users treated as the main reason to subscribe. In a thread on 20 August headed “Comet has been gutted”, user ddd27ddd laid out the loss: “My whole reason for jumping to Perplexity is now dead. You now must use computer and it’s very expensive credits to use the agentic browser. Huge cut into my workflows.” The complaint isn’t that a feature stopped existing; it’s that a feature people already paid for got moved behind a separate credit meter (“Computer”) they now have to spend down. That’s the recurring shape of the week: not a price rise you can see on the pricing page, but a quiet re-pricing of things that used to be included. It’s the video crowd’s credit-trap complaint from last week, transplanted to a research tool. The web app, quietly stripped Alongside the headline feature, users caught smaller removals that are easy to miss and annoying to live with. sho-ne, on 20 August, itemised what had gone from the web version: “Perplexity no longer tells me which model was actually used to prepare an answer. Additionally, it’s no longer possible to remove an answer… These features are kind of a big deal for me, yet I see no posts mention it.” Losing the label that tells you which model answered matters more than it sounds, because model choice is half of what you’re paying a multi-model tool to manage. In the same thread, Powerful-Cheek-6677 did the value arithmetic out loud: “Now, basically we are paying $200 for a search engine with 10k credits a month. Almost all connectors have moved into computer… So, it’s really lost any value it had.” Taken one at a time, none of these removals is a scandal; a company is allowed to change its product, and software churns. Taken together, over a single fortnight, they read as a plan being hollowed out from the inside — the same monthly price, now minus the browser feature, minus the usage meter, minus the label telling you which model answered, minus a couple of models people had chosen on purpose, and routed through a second currency you top up to get the agentic features back. The pricing page didn’t change. The product behind it did, and it shrank in the direction of the paid add-on. The moan of the day: a subscription that keeps shrinking The single most representative complaint of the week came from RealPlatypus8041 on 21 August, under the title “Removing Gemini 3.1 pro was the last straw.” It’s a litany, and the cumulative effect is the point — each removal small, the total a different product than the one they subscribed to. It’s our moan of the day: “I used to never run out of image generation credits. I can generate like 5 per week now. I used to daily GPT 5.5. They removed that. I switched to Gemini 3.1 pro thinking. They removed that… I really did love the product and the concept. This is not how you keep customers.” — RealPlatypus8041, r/perplexity_ai, 21 August 2026 In fairness — and this is the necessary counterweight — not everyone agreed the removals were downgrades. Replying in the same thread, Similar_Pension_4233 argued the swap was an improvement: “Flash 3.7 thinking is better than 3.1 Pro is nearly all type of tasks. You’re getting an upgrade.” That’s a real dispute, and worth flagging: some model changes genuinely are upgrades. But the complaint underneath isn’t really about which model is best. It’s about a menu changing under you without notice, after you paid for the version that had the dish you liked. “An intrusive ad, despite having a paid sub” What turned annoyance into anger was the sense of being pushed toward the paid “Computer” product inside a plan people already pay for. A thread bluntly titled “Feedback: Please stop begging us to use perplexity computer”, posted by True-Collection-6262 on 22 August, cleared a hundred upvotes. In the comments, Early_Alternative211 named the mechanism: “It sets it by default in project spaces, so it’s basically an intrusive ad, despite having a paid sub.” An advert inside a product you pay to use is one of the oldest dark patterns going, and it stings more when the thing being advertised is a credit meter. The broader diagnosis came from Torodaddy, on 20 August, who read it as strategy rather than accident: “perplexity does not want individual accounts. They are enterprise focused now and just plan to make it more and more unpleasant to see what costs they can cut from subscriptions for individuals.” We’d flag that as a user’s theory, not a documented fact — we can’t see inside Perplexity’s strategy, and we won’t assert a motive the company hasn’t stated. But the experience the comment describes, of a consumer plan getting quietly less pleasant, is exactly what the rest of the thread is documenting. When the bill arrives and the credits don’t The hardest complaints to wave away were the billing ones, because they’re concrete. AcidSadBoy, on 24 August, described paying for Max and receiving none of what it promises: “On August 17, I paid for a Max subscription… but I received 0 of the 10,000 monthly Computer credits that are supposed to come with the plan… I’m paying for Max while being unable to use Computer, which is one of the main reasons I subscribed to Max in the first place.” By his account support confirmed the problem — “The separate monthly Max grant of 10,000 Computer credits is not displayed” — and then spent a week “investigating” without a resolution or a refund. And getting out wasn’t simple either. DozePila, on 20 August, wanted to cancel before a promotional year lapsed into a paid charge and couldn’t even sign in: “When I try to sign in to my Perplexity account, it asks for a code sent via SMS, though I don’t have access to that phone number anymore… even when I get past the automated AI response and I’m told an agent will reach out, they don’t.” A plan that’s easy to buy and hard to leave, with a support queue that stalls when money is owed back, is the least defensible item on this list, because none of it is about the hard problem of building good AI. It’s about the easy problem of treating paying customers decently — the parts of a product a company controls completely, which is what makes letting them fail a choice rather than a growing pain. It isn’t only Perplexity: “unlimited” with a ceiling To keep this honest and cross-tool, the same “the thing you paid for shrank” dynamic surfaced at OpenAI. On 24 August in r/ChatGPT, DaBobcat reported buying ChatGPT Pro for an image project on the strength of one word on the pricing page: “The pricing page says Pro comes with ‘unlimited and faster image creation’… A few hundred images in, I got rate limited. Reached out to support, and the response was: ‘Pro access remains subject to usage allowances.’ So the word ‘unlimited’ is… well… a lie.” We’d put it more carefully than the poster: “unlimited” on the pricing page and “subject to usage allowances” from support can’t both be the whole truth, and the gap between them is the story. Fair-usage limits on an “unlimited” plan aren’t unusual or, on their own, scandalous — but if the ceiling is real, the honest place to state it is the pricing page, not the support ticket you open after you hit it. And a few hundred images in a day is a generous allowance for most people, which is what makes labelling it “unlimited” an unforced error: the honest number would have sounded perfectly good on its own. It’s the same complaint as the rest of the week, wearing a different logo: the flat plan that turns out to have a meter after you’ve paid. What to take from it, fairly The caveats are real and we’ll state them plainly. These are self-selecting subreddits full of heavy users; the contented majority rarely posts; some of the removed models genuinely were replaced with better ones; one person’s billing saga isn’t an audit. None of these posts proves a company acted in bad faith, and we’ve tried to separate documented behaviour (a browser feature now behind credits, a missing model label) from users’ theories about why. But notice what kind of complaints these are. They aren’t vibes about AI being soulless. They’re specific, checkable observations about products people pay for: a feature moved behind a credit wall, a usage meter removed, models pulled from a plan, a promised credit grant that never landed, an “unlimited” tier with an undisclosed cap. The fixes they imply are boringly reasonable, and they’re the same ones every kind of AI user keeps asking for: Don’t remove paid features without notice — if something included is moving behind a new meter, say so before it happens, not after users find the wall. Keep the plan legible — show which model answered, show the usage that remains, and don’t default a paid user into a product that spends extra credits. State real limits where people decide — “unlimited” with a fair-usage cap belongs on the pricing page, not in a support reply. Make leaving as easy as joining — and resolve billing failures faster than a week when the money owed is yours. None of it is a revolution. It’s the baseline a paying customer is entitled to expect — and the reason these threads keep filling up, and ending in cancelled subscriptions, is that this week, across more than one company, it was quietly being missed. Originally published at theaidownside.com — evidence-first reporting on the costs and trade-offs behind AI products.