Perplexity's always-on AI agents just reached the Mac app. Here's what they actually do, who can use them, and the credit catch hidden in the fine print.
Perplexity Teammates are AI agents that take on a standing job, such as sorting bug reports, running a marketing campaign or tracking sales, and keep working on it without new prompts. They split work into tasks, bring in extra agents when needed, remember your corrections, and return finished results for you to review. The feature reached the Perplexity Mac app on November 13, after a web launch in early November.
It isn't cheap. You need Perplexity Max, which costs $200 a month or $2,000 a year. Teammates are free to run during a promotional period, but Perplexity says they'll later use Max credits, and it hasn't said how many.
Perplexity says you pick which tools each Teammate can connect to, and Teammates send approval requests as they work.
Perplexity Teammates are AI agents you hand a whole job to, not a single question, and they keep working on it around the clock until you check back. On November 13, Perplexity brought the feature to its Mac app, about a week after it first appeared on the web.
The catch is the price of entry. You only get Perplexity Teammates with a Max subscription, which costs $200 a month. So before you look at the demos, it helps to know exactly what that money buys, how much control you keep, and where the costs could creep higher later.
Perplexity Teammates is a feature that turns AI agents into ongoing helpers with a standing responsibility. An agent is an AI that can take actions, like opening websites or using apps, instead of only writing replies. A normal chatbot waits for your next message. A Teammate is given a role, such as running a growth campaign, sorting new bug reports, watching business metrics or researching a market, and then it decides on its own what to do next.
Each Teammate breaks its goal into smaller tasks, can call in extra agents to handle pieces in parallel, and reviews the results before handing you something finished. That could be a report, a code change ready for approval, or a settings update. It then keeps watching and updates its work when things change.
Memory is a big part of the pitch. A Teammate holds on to project goals, past tasks and shared files between runs, and it remembers your corrections. Perplexity’s own example: tell an operations Teammate that an outside agency needs two weeks’ notice, and it plans with that lead time from then on.
Perplexity shows Teammates working in familiar office roles. Some of the examples it gives:
In one demo, an engineering Teammate keeps an eye on server alerts overnight, tracks a broken software release back to its cause, and prepares a fix with a rollback plan. Then it stops and waits for a human to approve it. That pause matters, and we’ll come back to it.
Teammates can also live in Slack. Add one to a channel, and your coworkers can give it tasks or ask how things are going.
Perplexity Teammates require Perplexity Max. Here’s what that means for your wallet:
The part most buyers will miss is how usage gets counted. Perplexity has said Teammates are free for Max members during a promotional period, but that they will eventually use up credits from the monthly allowance that comes with Max. It hasn’t said how many credits one Teammate burns. It does warn that bigger jobs cost more, especially when several agents run at once, chew through large files or codebases, or run frequent automations.
So the honest answer to “how much does it cost” is $200 a month for now, with a usage bill that isn’t fully defined yet. All of the prices Perplexity has published are in US dollars.
Perplexity first released Teammates on the web as a research preview, meaning a test version that’s still being built and may change. Most reports date that web launch to November 4, though at least one puts it a day later. The Mac app followed on November 13, when Perplexity announced it on X.
Phones are less clear. Several reports from the launch week said iPhone and Android support would come later, with no date. One report on the Mac release says Teammates had already been available on iOS. If you plan to manage a Teammate from your phone, check the app before you pay for Max.
To set one up on the web, you pick Teammates in the left-hand menu, give the agent a name based on its job, and connect the tools it needs, such as Slack, Gmail or GitHub. You then describe where its work comes from, what it should deliver and when it should act, and finally attach it to a Project with a first task.
A Teammate is only as safe as the accounts you connect to it, so this is the section to read twice. Each Teammate gets its own separate desktop and browser, which lets it use websites and apps that have no official connection to Perplexity. Perplexity says browser sessions and cookies stay inside that one Teammate rather than leaking between agents.
Access follows the permissions you’ve already set on connected tools and Projects. With GitHub, you can pick which code repositories a Teammate may touch. Perplexity also says saved passwords and logins are encrypted, entered through a protected path, and hidden from the agent itself.
You keep a few levers. You can read each Teammate’s thread, give feedback, redirect it mid-task, or take over its desktop yourself. Teammates send progress updates and ask for approval at key moments. If you share a Teammate’s conversation with someone else, they get read-only access.
During setup, you choose which tools a Teammate connects to, such as Slack, Gmail or GitHub, and for GitHub you can limit it to selected repositories. In Perplexity’s own overnight engineering demo, the Teammate prepares its fix and then holds it until a person approves it. Perplexity hasn’t shown how reliably those safeguards perform in real-world use.
Perplexity Teammates aren’t the first agents of this kind. OpenAI’s Dots, Anthropic’s Claude Duet, Meta Muse and xAI’s Grok Bot all aim at work that carries on without constant prompting, and many run in the cloud so they keep going after you close your laptop.
Where Perplexity differs is in structure. It sells Teammates as a team: several agents with separate roles that share project context, pass work to each other and show up in Slack next to human colleagues. Meta Muse and ChatGPT Dots are described as relying on a single chat model rather than running multiple instances. Under the hood, Teammates sit on top of Perplexity Computer, the company’s existing agent system, which can already run fully on a Mac. You can also choose which AI model powers each Teammate and task. A new Teammate defaults to Claude Opus 5.5.
The big gap is price. Because of the Max requirement, launch coverage singled out Perplexity’s take as far pricier than its rivals. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has bigger plans, saying on X that he sees a future with hundreds of Teammates working for each person in an organization. That’s an ambition, not something the current preview delivers.
No. You need Perplexity Max at $200 a month. Teammates don’t use extra credits during the current promotion, but Perplexity says that will change.
Yes. Perplexity added Teammates to its Mac app on November 13 for Max subscribers. It also works on the web.
It works on its own between check-ins, but it sends approval requests for key steps, and you can redirect it or take over its desktop at any time.
You're reading the quick version.
Read next
Claude meeting note taker: Meet only, Team and Enterprise first
Claude Meetings puts Anthropic's AI into your video calls as a visible participant. Here's who gets it, where it works and what it won't do.
The machine learning veteran says Microsoft AI wanted bigger models, not research. Here is what happened to AI Frontiers, his cost-cutting idea and the AutoGen framework.
OpenAI's new Wallet lets its dot agents pay at checkout using a stand-in card number, but every order still needs your face or fingerprint first.
Meta's AI agent now dials businesses and waits on hold for paying US subscribers. Here's what it costs, how it talks, and how it stacks up against Google's Pixel version.
The Daily Brief
Every morning, the news that matters from AI, phones, apps and the people shaping tech. Explained in plain English. Free.
One email a day. No spam, unsubscribe anytime. Privacy policy
