$200 a month. That's what Perplexity is charging to turn your spare Mac mini into a 24/7 AI worker that monitors your email, queries your databases, and builds spreadsheets while you sleep.
Announced at the company's inaugural Ask Conference on March 11, Personal Computer is software that runs continuously on a dedicated Mac mini. It connects to your local files and applications while tapping into Perplexity's cloud servers, creating what the company calls "a digital proxy for you." The pitch: give it objectives, not instructions, and it handles the rest around the clock.
What It Actually Does
Personal Computer integrates with Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and Salesforce out of the box, plus over 40 finance data tools including SEC filings, FactSet, S&P Global, and Coinbase. It can monitor triggers across those services, execute tasks proactively, and keep working while you're offline.
On the enterprise side, Perplexity is adding native connections to Snowflake, HubSpot, and "hundreds" of other platforms, with SOC 2 Type II compliance, SAML single sign-on, and isolated query sandboxing. The company says users can build interactive dashboards, Excel models, and financial applications without needing an analytics team.
CEO Aravind Srinivas framed it bluntly: "A traditional operating system takes instructions; an AI operating system takes objectives."
The Catch: Price and Access
Personal Computer requires a Perplexity Max subscription at $200/month, which includes 10,000 monthly compute credits. That's on top of supplying your own Mac mini (currently $599 for the base model). So the real entry cost is roughly $800 upfront plus $2,400 per year.
Access is waitlist-only at launch and Mac-only. No word on Windows or Linux support.
On security, Perplexity says sensitive actions require explicit user approval, every session gets a full audit trail, and there's a kill switch for immediate control. That's a meaningful differentiator from some competitors in the agent space, where the "let AI do things on your computer" model has raised legitimate concerns about runaway actions.
The broader play here is clear. Perplexity orchestrates 20 different frontier AI models rather than building its own, which means it can swap in whichever model handles a particular task best. That's a practical advantage over agents locked to a single model provider.
For most individual users, $200/month is steep for what amounts to a background automation tool. But for small business owners or analysts who spend hours on repetitive data pulls, monitoring, and report building, the math could work out quickly. The real test will be whether the integrations are deep enough to replace actual workflows rather than just demo well on stage.