Perplexity Teammates Explained: Setup, Cost, and Limits

Most AI agents quit the moment you close the tab. Perplexity just launched agents that are built to keep going: you hand one a job, and it watches, acts, and reports back without waiting for your next prompt.

Perplexity Teammates went live on November 5, 2026, as a research preview for Max subscribers on the web. Here is what they do, what they cost, how I would set up a first one, and where I would hold back.

Perplexity Teammates at a Glance

A teammate is a persistent agent that owns an ongoing job, like running an ad account or watching production alerts. Perplexity says each one starts from your existing Projects, skills, and memory in Computer, then monitors ongoing work and acts when something changes, without being prompted again.

Advantage: It remembers past work, applies your feedback to future tasks, and can message coworkers in Slack, so you stop explaining the same job from scratch every session.
Limitation: It needs a Max plan, runs on the web only for now, and uses the same credit pool as Computer.
Ideal users: Solo founders, small teams, marketers, and engineers with recurring work that follows rules you can write down.
Use case: Monitoring alerts, managing ad spend, triaging bugs, chasing overdue invoices, and watching competitor pricing.

How Teammates Differ From a Normal Computer Task

Perplexity launched Computer in February 2026. I covered one of its later upgrades in my post on Computer making videos. Digital Trends points out that Computer ran in temporary sandboxes that vanished after each job. Teammates stick around.

Question	Computer task	Teammate
How long does it live?	One job, then the sandbox is gone	Persistent, with its own thread in your sidebar
What starts it?	Your prompt	A change in the work it monitors, or your instruction
Does it learn?	Uses your memory and skills	Also applies your feedback to future tasks
Who does it talk to?	You	You, other teammates, and coworkers in Slack

What a Teammate Can Actually Do

These are the sample roles on Perplexity’s own page. They are vendor examples, not test results, so read them as intent.

On-call engineer: Pulls logs and traces after an alert, finds the root cause, and opens a pull request with a rollback plan. It pages you only when it needs approval or cannot isolate the cause within 15 minutes.
Ads manager: Runs campaigns within spend caps, pauses weak ads, and escalates decisions to you.
Legal research assistant: Reviews contracts against standard terms and drafts redlines.
A small shop’s back office: Perplexity’s denim retailer example lists sales, ops, marketing, and finance roles, including one that drafts reminders for overdue invoices and another that watches competitor pricing.

The most useful demo came from the launch coverage. In Digital Trends’ coverage, an ads teammate found creator ads beating the customer acquisition cost target, prepared a bigger campaign, and sent a contract extension to the legal team. The brand director then told it to do that without asking next time. That last step is the whole point: you promote the agent as it earns trust.

Which Jobs to Hand Over First

Not every task suits an agent that acts on its own. The best first jobs share three traits: they repeat, the rules fit in a paragraph, and a mistake is cheap to undo.

Good first job: A weekly report that pulls the same numbers from the same tools. If it is wrong, you catch it in a minute.
Good first job: Watching a channel or inbox and sorting what comes in. It can flag and draft, and you still press send.
Wait on this one: Anything that spends money, signs contracts, or emails customers. Earn trust on low stakes work first, the way the brand director in the demo did.

How to Hire Your First Teammate (Step by Step)

I could not find a detailed setup guide from Perplexity yet. So treat the steps below as my suggested playbook, built from what Perplexity has described, not as official instructions.

Pick one job that repeats. Weekly competitor price checks, bug triage, and ad reporting all work. “Run my business” does not.
Build the Project first. Teammates start from your Projects, skills, and memory in Computer. Drop in brand notes, past reports, and examples of good output before you create anything.
Write a role brief. Use the template below.
Connect only the tools it needs. Teammates follow Computer’s existing tool and Project permissions, and skills run with the same permissions you have. Give it less access than you think it needs, then add more.
Set spend caps and stop rules in plain language. Tell it what needs your approval and what it can do alone.
Watch the first few runs. You can review its work, take over its desktop, or redirect it while it works.
Correct it in the thread. Feedback carries into future tasks, so a clear correction now saves you the same correction later.
Add it to Slack last. Once its output is boring and reliable, let it monitor a channel and message your team.

A role brief you can copy and adapt:

“You are my ads manager for [brand]. Your goal is a customer acquisition cost under [amount].”
“Check performance every morning and pause any ad that spends [amount] without a sale.”
“Never spend more than [amount] per day. Ask me before you change the budget.”
“Send me a short summary of what you changed and why. Flag anything odd.”

What It Costs

Teammates are not priced separately. They draw on the Max plan’s Computer credits, and Max runs $200 a month, or $167 a month billed annually, with 10,000 monthly Computer credits. Check Perplexity’s pricing page before you buy, because outlets quote the monthly and annual figures differently.

Perplexity says every Max plan includes free teammate usage during a promotional period. It has not said how large that grant is or when it ends, and it has not published what a given teammate activity costs in credits. After the promotion, teammates draw from the credits already in your plan.

My advice: run one teammate for a week, check your credit balance daily, and only then add a second.

The Honest Limitations

It is gated. Free and Pro users must upgrade to Max to try it. Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max accounts are not included by default.
It is web only for now. Perplexity says iOS and Android are coming, with no dates.
It is a research preview. Expect rough edges, and expect the rules to change.
The credit cost is unclear. An agent that runs around the clock can burn through an allowance faster than a tool you open twice a day.
Independent testing is thin. The launch was days ago, and most of what exists is Perplexity’s own demos and press coverage of them.
An agent that acts unprompted is a risk. It can message your coworkers and touch your tools. A badly scoped brief is how a small mistake gets repeated every morning.

Who Else Is Building This

Digital Trends names OpenAI’s workspace agents, Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork, and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork as the nearest rivals, and notes the first two are aimed at organizations more than individual subscribers. If you want a lighter option for recurring work, I reviewed one in my post on Maskara.ai.

The Bottom Line

If you already pay for Max and have a recurring job with clear rules, a teammate is worth a trial, especially while usage is free. If you are on Pro, there is no reason to upgrade just for this today. Wait for independent reviews and a clearer credit picture.

Try this today: write down one task you repeat every week, then rewrite it as a role brief with a goal, a spend cap, and a “ask me first” rule. If you cannot write that brief, no agent can do the job yet.

Sources and further reading

Perplexity, Teammates product page.
Perplexity on X, Teammates launch thread.
Digital Trends, Perplexity’s new AI coworkers can take over your workload, but they don’t come cheap.
ShiftDelete.Net, Perplexity Teammates Bring Always-On AI Agents to Max.
MLQ.ai, Perplexity’s Teammates Put Always-On AI Agents Behind a $200 Monthly Paywall.
Startup Fortune, Perplexity launches Teammates AI agents as Wall Street doubts AI payoffs.