Duck.ai vs Perplexity Comparison

• Plus (monthly): USD 9.99/month or USD 99.99/year — price for DuckDuckGo's full 4-in-1 subscription (VPN + advanced Duck.ai models + Personal Information Removal + Identity Theft Restoration), NOT a Duck.ai-only tier
• Pro (monthly): USD 19.99/month or USD 199.99/year — same 4-in-1 bundle as Plus, plus Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol, higher reasoning effort, and 2x higher usage limits in Duck.ai

• Pro (individual, monthly): $20/mo billed monthly — shown as $17/mo equivalent when billed annually
• Max (individual, monthly): $200/mo billed monthly — shown as $167/mo equivalent when billed annually

6 free models (Claude 4.5 Haiku, Mistral Small 4, GPT-5.4 nano, GPT-5.4 mini, gpt-oss-120b, Gemma 4 31B) available with no account; DuckDuckGo does not publish the exact daily message cap, only that one exists

Free is listed as good for limited daily usage, with basic AI models and limited file uploads. The model picker, the larger Deep Research and file-upload allowances, and Computer access are Pro and Max features.

By default, Duck.ai does not record or store any of your chats. Model providers commit to Zero Data Retention — deleting prompts and responses immediately after generating a reply — with one disclosed exception: prompts may be held in short-term memory for up to 1 hour for caching (to reduce cost and latency), but this cache is never written to disk.

Perplexity states it retains personal information as long as the account is active and removes it from its servers within 30 days of account deletion, which is requested through a form rather than a settings button. Incognito sessions expire within 24 hours and are not recoverable. Opting out of AI training applies only to data collected after the opt-out; data already collected for training cannot be removed.

Legal entity Duck Duck Go, Inc.; company page confirms independent ownership, majority-owned by founder Gabriel Weinberg and team members since 2008.

Perplexity AI, Inc., a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco, California. VeraSafe is appointed as its GDPR Article 27 representative for users in the EU and UK, and Perplexity certifies to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.