Perplexity Teammates Are Persistent Agents With Their Own Browser, Slack and GitHub Access, Included in Max. Here Is What I'd Scope Before Hiring One.
Perplexity launched Teammates on November 4: agents that keep a persistent thread, run in their own environment with their own browser sessions, and can be added to your Slack channels. They're included with the Max plan, which press coverage reports at $200 a month. For a solo operator the question isn't whether that's cheaper than a human assistant. It's what you're willing to hand a piece of software that never logs off.
What Perplexity says it is
From the launch post: Teammates run on the Computer feature's projects, skills and memory, and each one has its own environment and browser sessions. Integrations named include Slack, GitHub, where you choose which repositories it can access, and Gmail. Teammates can pass work to each other, and you can review what one is doing, take over its desktop, or redirect it. Saved credentials are encrypted. It launches on the web, with iOS promised soon, and Perplexity says it will expand access and features in the coming weeks.
What the post does not say matters just as much. There's no dollar price beyond Max, no credit amounts, and no usage caps, concurrency limits or run-time limits that I could find. During a promotional period Max includes free Teammate usage, and afterward Teammates draw on the credits already included in the plan. How many credits that is, nobody has said. Platform timing is also inconsistent between the launch post and the product page.
The cost is the blast radius
A persistent agent with Gmail access can read every receipt, reset email and customer reply in your inbox, and one with GitHub access can open pull requests against your code. I wrote this week about Postman installing agent plugins without asking, and the lesson transfers: the risk of agent tooling is the access it quietly accumulates. A Teammate is explicitly built to accumulate context over time, which is the feature and the exposure in one.
How I'd scope one
Give it its own identity. A fresh email address that receives only forwarded mail you choose, a separate Slack channel it can see and no others, and one low-stakes repository, never the one that deploys to production. Start read-only for a week: let it research, summarize and draft, and approve anything that leaves the building. Keep a log of every action you had to correct, because that log is your real onboarding cost.
Then treat the first two weeks like a trial hire. Pick three recurring tasks you do by hand, such as triaging a support inbox, compiling a weekly competitor digest, or labeling issues. Time how long each takes you, how long the Teammate takes, and how long you spend checking its work. If checking takes more than half of doing, the task isn't ready.
Where I could be wrong
I haven't used it. Everything above comes from the launch post and product page, whose "on-call engineer" example is marketing, not evidence. The promotional free usage may mean the real economics only appear when the credits start counting. And persistence might be exactly what makes it useful: an agent that remembers last week's decisions could save more review time than my cautious scoping costs. Treat my checklist as the minimum, not the verdict.
What I'd actually do
If you already pay for Max, use the promotional window and run the three-task trial on a throwaway inbox and one sandbox repo. If you don't, I wouldn't upgrade just for this until the credit amounts are published, because "included" with no number is a price you can't plan around. Either way, don't connect the inbox you use for banking and domain registrars. Nothing a Teammate saves you is worth a compromised registrar account.
Author
Lukas
@lukcombinator