PCWorld
I want a personal AI assistant. There, I said it. I want a team of agents on my computer that take over my system, sort through email, pick through my calendar events, scour the web for news and trends I care about, craft to-do lists and check off the items it can do on its own, and organize my day. Go ahead and sign me up. The problem, of course, is getting a personal AI assistant that can do all that securely and safely. OpenClaw, the open-source sensation that kicked off the whole personal AI craze earlier this year, is both tricky to install and tough to control, prone to nuking inboxes without notice while being an easy target for hackers. Enter Perplexity, which is launching an AI assistant for the Mac that’s designed to smooth out the rough edges of OpenClaw. Built with transparency in mind so you can see what it’s doing and confined in a sandbox that acts as a safety net, Perplexity’s Personal Computer looks to be OpenClaw for everybody. Just one problem: Personal Computer isn’t priced for everybody. Widely available as of Thursday after weeks of waitlist-only access, Personal Computer isn’t available for free Perplexity users, nor can you use it on Perplexity’s $20-per-month Pro plan. No, you can only access Personal Computer via Perplexity’s Max tier, which costs an eye-popping $200 monthly. I may cover AI for a living, but I’m not earning AI-tech-bro bucks and I have to pay for my AI subscriptions out of my own pocket. I refuse to pay more than $20/month for any single AI service, and I’ve allowed myself three of them going at once (right now they’re ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini). As much as I’d like to try Personal Computer, I won’t pay $200/month for it. (And just for the record, I’m not begging to be comped. I prefer covering my own expenses, thanks.) Of course, Perplexity could simply be setting a realistic price given what Personal Computer does. AI agents are notorious usage hogs, spending AI tokens like no tomorrow as they perform multi-step tasks. And if one AI agent can spend a small fortune on AI tokens, imagine how much damage a team of agents could do. Perplexity might be trying to dodge the ire that’s now being directed at Anthropic, with Claude Pro users instantly blowing through their five-hour usage allotments when using such agentic AI tools as Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Yes, $20-a-month Claude Pro users like me can dabble in Cowork and Claude Code, but you only get a taste (similar to how Jeff Probst allows starving Survivor contestants only a nibble of a reward-challenge feast before they fight for the mouth-watering prize). The hard truth is that agentic AI functionality like coding assistants and personal AI agent teams pretty much require north of $100/month if you want to get anything real done, or at least that’s the pricing reality short of a breakthrough in AI token efficiency . For everyday AI users like me and (probably) you—people who need that money for groceries, electricity, gas, and Netflix—agentic AI tools like Perplexity’s Personal Computer remain frustratingly out of reach.
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