Over the past few months, I’ve been deliberately paying for two AI services: Perplexity Pro and Kimi Allegretto. On the surface, that probably looks strange—even to me—but in practice they fill different roles. In this article, I want to share my personal experience: where Perplexity is genuinely stronger than a classic “chat with a model,” where Kimi turns out to be more useful, and what I end up criticizing in each of them. Why Pay for AI Assistants at All I regularly do more than just coding—I also spend a lot of time on research and self-education: tracking who is launching what, which pricing plans are appearing, and how AI products and architectures are evolving. On top of that, I’m constantly reading articles, documentation, blogs, and technical deep dives. Standard assistants at the level of an “IDE helper” like Cursor and similar tools are not enough for this: they help write code, but they do not really handle deep research or help build a broad picture of the market.…