I paid for Perplexity Pro for a while. It was somewhat useful for researching technical articles. But I found it got too much wrong in areas I knew about, so I couldn't trust it in areas I didn't. If I have to double check what it tells me, I might as well use a search engine, so I moved that spending to Kagi.

I believe that many are willing to pay if the results are good enough when compared to free alternatives.

However, as many studies show in Youtube/Meta/GoogleSearch ad revenue per user, the subscription price needs to be really high to match the ad profits.

If you want to maximize the profits, you include ads.

I pay and I don't see an excemption for pro accounts.

I am already pretty pissed at them for pushing the election widget so hard - you could click on the X, but it would come back on every new search I opened.

Yes, which is fine