I was a paying customer for around 6 months. Perplexity's UI was better for finding sources and their model prompts and settings were better at proving summaries from pages at the time I left.

The one thing that kept me on Phind for a lot longer than I would have otherwise been was that I could pay for Claude usage when I over ran my daily quota. With Sonnet 3.5 there wasn't a point since I wasn't getting over the limits for Perplexity and you didn't provide a way to use an api key for Openai models at the time - to this day I find that GPT4 turbo is better than 4o for my use cases. This alone would have kept me around.

Since then Perplexity has gotten worse and they removed a lot of the old useful models. If you have something like poe.com where I can select the model to answer a query and give me fine grained control over the model settings I'd come back in a heart beat - e.g. if I'm doing research I don't know the answer to a high temperature is a good thing, if I want to find bugs in code a low one is better. My current killer feature is something like undermind where complex queries are run in the background and I get reports in due course by email.

Happy to chat more, my email is in my profile. I work in the space and have been building proprietary systems to help ground financial search for two years now.

It's too expensive: I'm not opposed to paying for things, but when I looked at the cost structure, I thought I'd quickly exceed the limits. (Back then it was something absurd like 20 searches a day) For personal use, I personally am a super-miser when it comes to subscriptions and this just is too expensive. It would make more sense as part of bundle of other services that I will use.

(For example, I subscribed to Google Music a few years back, then got addicted to add-free YouTube, so I haven't canceled.)

It was too unreliable: I would use it for 4-5 searches, and it would be ultra-responsive and have a great UI. Then, all of a sudden, on a search it would be ultra-slow and fall back to a horrible UI that made absolutely no sense.

Edit:

Google's AI integration is good enough: Shortly after I switched back to Google, they started adding small AI answers at the top of the search. That's good enough for what I'm looking for.

are you from phind? phind got worse over time. what happened? obviously you have changed something. but still, thanks for making it available for free. I hope it stays this way.