Two free ways to get a Perplexity Pro subscription for one year

If you’ve been interested in upgrading your AI experience with one of the available paid subscriptions, pay attention because here’s your chance to score a free year of Perplexity Pro. 

Perplexity is a free AI chatbot and internet search tool that operates like other AI chatbots. ZDNET senior contributing editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols called it his favorite chatbot, beating out ChatGPT and Copilot.

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Perplexity Pro gives you several advantages over a free account. These include increased usage of Pro Search, which breaks down queries with multi-step reasoning and programming; the option to choose which AI model you want to use; file analysis, which lets you upload documents for summaries or insights; multimodal capabilities, where you can capture a picture or screenshot and asking questions about it; and image generation from Access Playground v3, OpenAI DALL-E 3, Flux, and Stable Diffusion XL.

Usually, the service costs $20 a month or $200 a year, but there are currently several ways to get a free subscription. Here’s what you need to know. 

1. Free Perplexity Pro for Xfinity customers

Xfinity has a customer rewards program that’s free to join. The rewards range from movie ticket discounts to savings on theme parks and sporting events. A few months ago, Perplexity announced a partnership with Xfinity to offer a free year subscription of Perplexity Pro to Xfinity customers. 

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Here’s how to claim your free Perplexity Pro subscription:

Free Perplexity Pro for eligible college students

Earlier this year, Perplexity ran a competition in which any college student with an .edu email address could claim a free month of Perplexity Pro. If more than 500 students from the same campus signed up, the entire campus got a free year of Perplexity Pro. Forty-five schools reached that mark, including Arizona State University, the University of California, Berkeley, New York University, and the University of Southern California. You can find the complete list here. 

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If you’re a student at one of the universities on the list, all you have to do is enter your student email address to claim your free year.