I'm conflicted on this. I use perplexity at the moment because they gave out a year of pro subscriptions, and it's geuninely pretty useful since it is so heavily based on web results. The one gpt wrapper product that I've liked so far.
With the actual model producers now also adding web search, the question is how long they will survive and how much value they can realistically add. The third-party models are also nerfed with less context length, and also seem less capable overall when comparing sonnet on perplexity to sonnet in the claude interface.
It makes sense that when the massive funding runs out these companies won't be able to offer free plans without ads or anything, still sucks.