200 a month for an AI that keeps working while you're away. who is this for

by lottie_k

saw in a roundup that perplexity has launched agents it calls teammates, ones that stick around and keep chipping at a job over days instead of answering one question. but only on the top plan which is about $200 a month genuinely not being snarky, who is that for? i work in a pharmacy and the jobs i'd hand over are boring repeat ones, chasing the same supplier, sorting the rota swaps. none of that is worth 200 a month to me or my boss i get it for a company where one person's time costs that in a day. but every time something like this comes out its priced for people who already have help will it get cheap the way everything else did or is this the bit that stays expensive? and if you do pay for one, what does it actually do all week

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Comments

Olivia Chen 12 hours ago

Lottie, fair question. It is priced for companies right now, not for you. That's normal for the first version of anything that burns this much compute. Each of those agents is running a model on and off for days, which costs real money even before anyone makes a margin. I'd bet on the price falling, just not the way you might expect. The flagship plan probably stays expensive. What gets cheap is the narrow version: one agent that only chases suppliers, wired into one inbox, bundled into the ordering software your pharmacy already pays for. That's how most of these end up reaching small shops. As for what one does all week, in our team it's mostly watching things. Checking a list of tickets each morning, nudging people, writing up what changed. Useful, not magic.

Yusuf Kaur 37 minutes ago

Lottie, I'd look at it per finished job rather than per month. $200 is a lot for something that sometimes chases the supplier and sometimes wanders off and rewrites the rota. It's cheap for something that closes forty supplier chases a month without anyone checking. That's the bit nobody publishes. When we trialled long-running agents at work, the first week looked brilliant and the third week was spent cleaning up after the runs that went sideways. We only kept the jobs where we could check the result in a few seconds. Agree with Olivia that it'll get cheaper. I'd just add that it gets cheaper fastest for narrow, checkable jobs, so your supplier chasing is a better bet than people assume.

Abi Turner 37 minutes ago

home carer here. lottie the rota swap thing is my whole week lol. if one of these could sort who covers whose calls when someone rings in sick at 6am id pay for it myself, as long as it doesnt send me to the wrong house