PayPal and Venmo users in the U.S. and certain global markets are getting free early access to Perplexity Comet, the search engine startup's AI-powered browser.

On Wednesday, PayPal, which owns Venmo, announced a partnership with Perplexity as part of its new subscriptions hub, for managing subscriptions linked to PayPal. This is part of an offer for a free 12-month trial of Perplexity Pro, which offers premium features like unlimited searches with advanced models and access to third party models from OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and Grok. This subscription normally costs $200 a year.

Perplexity launched Comet in July as a browser that weaves generative AI into the web-browsing experience. Specifically, that includes stuff like an AI assistant in the sidebar and AI models that can do the searching for you across the web and open tabs. Comet can also take action on your behalf, such as adding items to your shopping cart and managing your inbox and calendar. Of course all of these features require extensive access to your data, so any semblance of privacy basically goes out the window. Even though Perplexity stores most of the data on your device, you're still giving Perplexity access to your email, browsing behavior, and more.

When Comet launched, it was initially available only to Perplexity Max ($200 a month) users, but has since rolled out to Perplexity Pro subscribers. Mashable got early access to the AI browser and tested out some of its features. We liked some of the summarization features and the sidecar AI assistant, but the agentic capabilities, i.e. the features that can do shopping and ordering for you, simply didn't work well enough to replace the handful of quick steps a human normally does.

However, Venmo and PayPal users no longer have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis of signing up for Perplexity Comet. Now you get a whole year to try it out. Just remember that the true cost might be what's left of your privacy.

How to sign up

There are a few different ways to redeem your free Perplexity Pro trial:

• Directly in the PayPal app or Venmo app

• Through a marketing email you may have received

• A dedicated Perplexity landing page

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.