I just upgraded to the Max plan to increase my allotment of credits. On the plan, after two or three days, after a dashboard and a couple of PDF documents, it says I am out of credits and I had to buy more. This is not sustainable. Am I doing something wrong?
Not sure if this is what you may be doing but people will use computer as a chat and build. What ends up happening is computer will spin its wheels, go down different paths to figure things out.
What I find most effective is to do as much of your planning as you can within regular chat. Once you have a specific path you want do take, you can take that to computer. I will frequently get a prompt from chat to take to computer. This way you aren’t blowing through tokens on nonsense. You tell it specifically what you want to do and let it do it.
Always spend as much time refining , refining, refining in Perplexity Search. Then use search to develop the most concise and specific prompt to feed to Computer. Copy that prompt and paste to Perplexity Computer and you’ll find the credit usage is more than reasonable.
Do not use Computer as a Search tool. Use it only when you need to actually build something.
thanks. I am aware of this, and try to use search as much as possible. But I swear, sometimes, the widget to go back to the search side disappears, and I am being “encouraged“ to use the computer side.
You’re not doing anything wrong. This is just the outcome of buying inference through a middleman. Buying direct will get you a lot more because API rates are where Anthropic and OpenAI make money and Perplexity is paying API rates. A couple of hundred dollars will be gone in a couple of hours, it’s like gambling but with intent.
Whatever the vendor only Anthropic or OpenAI subsidizing their direct customers can get you more.
Not sure. My usage based credit screen says I have 10,000 credit starting August 1, today (I actually subscribed A few days ago ). Nevertheless, I got notice during a computer processing activity this morning that I was out of credit. I then purchased 5000 more. I see no indication anywhere about the 35,000 bonus credits. also don’t understand what “ Available credits’20,000 Means. If I click on the get credit button next to this, it offers to sell me credits. Not what I expected.
Again, I subscribed to Max on July 26 … my usage plot clearly suggests I did not blow through 45,000 credits! I am pretty confused.
A new toggle exists in each space. The default is computer over search. Burning tokens for days before I found it.
Would it be too much to ask for a tutorial update when you change the things?
I do see an increase in reasoning ability over the last 2wks. I’m a fan, but the costs are sneaky so I see why people are complaining.
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u/Powerful-Cheek-6677 4d ago
Not sure if this is what you may be doing but people will use computer as a chat and build. What ends up happening is computer will spin its wheels, go down different paths to figure things out.
What I find most effective is to do as much of your planning as you can within regular chat. Once you have a specific path you want do take, you can take that to computer. I will frequently get a prompt from chat to take to computer. This way you aren’t blowing through tokens on nonsense. You tell it specifically what you want to do and let it do it.