Perplexity wants to run your inbox now—if you’re willing to fork over $200 a month. The company just rolled out Email Assistant, a new tool that lets you offload the grunt work of email: scheduling meetings, organizing and prioritizing threads, and drafting replies. It’s launching with support for Gmail and Outlook, and it’s only available if you’re on Perplexity’s high-roller Max plan.
The pitch is straightforward: forward or write to a designated assistant address, tell it what you need, and it gets to work. Think “executive assistant vibes” without having to actually hire someone or teach them your quirks. Perplexity says the assistant doesn’t train on your emails, but it will adopt your writing style for replies—which is exactly the kind of line privacy-conscious users want to hear right now. The feature is live today.
So, who is this for? At $200 a month, Perplexity isn’t aiming at civilians drowning in promo codes and shipping updates. This is a power-user play—founders, executives, deal teams, sales killers, PR wranglers, anyone who lives in the email trenches and hates losing an hour before lunch triaging threads and booking meetings. If the tool saves you 15–30 minutes a day, that’s 5–10 hours a month; value that time at even $50/hour and suddenly $200 doesn’t look insane. Big if, of course.
It’s also a shot across the bow of the incumbents. Microsoft and Google already bundle AI into their productivity stacks—Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Gemini for Workspace run roughly $20–$30 per user per month for individuals and business plans. Superhuman will set you back about $30. Shortwave sits in the $12–$24 zone. Perplexity’s Max at $200 is playing a different game: compete on quality, speed, and headroom, not on price. The company has been positioning Max as a top-tier tier—think faster responses, more generous limits, access to premium models—so hitching your inbox to it is a logical (if spendy) extension.
The workflow is a little old-school in a charming way. You email an assistant, tell it what to do, and it fires off scheduling requests or drafts. If that sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve been here before. Services like x.ai popularized the “CC-your-assistant” model a decade ago, and the approach still makes sense: email is the API. You don’t need a new app, you don’t need your counterpart to install anything, and the assistant can play nicely in existing threads without breaking everyone’s flow.
Still, there are trade-offs. Emailing a third-party agent means granting access to your inbox through Gmail/Outlook permissions. Perplexity says the assistant won’t train on your emails, which is table stakes now, but compliance-sensitive orgs will want the usual receipts: data retention, access scopes, audit logs, SOC 2, the works. And let’s be honest: if this thing misfires on a delicate thread—wrong time zone, wrong RSVP, wrong “per my last email” tone—that’s not a harmless oops.
The crowded “AI for your inbox” market doesn’t help either. Google can natively draft in Gmail, summarize long threads, and is hardwiring Gemini deeper into Workspace. Microsoft is doing the same with Copilot in Outlook. Those come effectively free (or close enough) if your company already pays for the suite. Perplexity is betting that a generalist AI assistant you already trust for research can be the one you trust for action—triage, scheduling, replies—without being trapped in a single vendor ecosystem.
There’s a strategic angle here that tracks with where AI is going: from chatbots to agents that actually do things. The inbox is a brutal place to start, but it’s also the most universal workflow on Earth. Suppose Perplexity can reliably prioritize what matters, tee up clean drafts in your voice, and handle the back-and-forth of scheduling without constant babysitting. In that case, it earns the right to touch other parts of your workday—docs, calendars, project tools. And if it can’t, well, it goes the way of every “smart inbox” before it: demo magic, real-world chaos.
Two practical observations:
- The value is in ruthless prioritization, not just drafting. Anyone can spit out a decent reply now. What you pay for is the judgment call: which threads to surface, which to punt, which to nuke. If Email Assistant gets that right, it’s sticky.
- The ceiling matters. Heavy email users regularly process 100+ messages a day by industry estimates. Rate limits, latency, and accuracy at volume will make or break this.
At $200 a month, this isn’t a mass-market play, and that’s fine. Perplexity is aiming squarely at the slice of users whose time is expensive and whose inbox is a war zone. If that’s you, $200 is either laughable or a rounding error—depending on how much pain this thing kills. If it isn’t you, there are cheaper, perfectly decent options that won’t try to be your whole AI brain.
Either way, it’s a telling move. AI assistants are starting to leak out of the chat window and into the unsexy, high-friction places where real work actually happens. If Perplexity can nail the inbox—consistently, securely, and without being annoying—it’ll have earned more than your subscription. It’ll have earned permission to automate the rest of your day. And that’s the game everyone in AI is trying to win. (via Engaget)
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