When Perplexity Comet’s assistant started acting on pages for people, we assumed that would be the part Perplexity kept outside any meter the longest, since it’s what makes an AI browser more than a browser. Sometime between about August 20 and September 15, 2026, “Control browser” reportedly started drawing on Perplexity Computer credits instead. We couldn’t find an announcement, only users noticing and comparing notes, and nobody seems to know yet what a typical task costs.
A free browser with a meter on the agent
Comet is Perplexity’s own browser, built on Chromium, and the assistant does its work inside Comet tabs. (Chrome, Edge and Brave are Chromium browsers too, which is partly why a switch to Comet can look smaller than it turns out to be.) The browser is free and runs on Windows 10 and later, macOS and Android, plus iOS since March 18. Pro comes with 4,000 one-time credits.
People leaving Comet also bring up features and models disappearing without much notice. We suspect the quiet removals do more damage than the credits, because you only find out about them on the day you reach for the thing that’s gone.
The Thursday order form
The job we keep coming back to is a dull one: the same supplier order every Thursday, done through Comet’s assistant. Log in to the portal, copy quantities from a sheet, check the delivery date, submit. Each of those Thursdays is now a Control browser task, spending credits at a rate nobody has published.
You could show dassi that order once instead, or describe it in plain English, and it would be saved as a workflow that runs on demand or every Thursday at nine, in your own browser, so the laptop has to be awake at nine on Thursdays. If you’d rather see the order before it goes, flag the submit button; dassi fills in the form and then sits there until you say yes, which some weeks will feel slower than doing it yourself. With your own key you pay $10 a month, plus whatever your provider charges for the tokens, and a local model is an option if you’d rather not pay per token at all.
Signing in without moving browsers
Comet’s assistant can only use accounts signed in inside Comet, so moving to it means signing in to the portal, the sheet and everything else all over again, and whatever you’d built up in your old browser either comes along or doesn’t. dassi works in the Chrome, Edge or Brave you already have. It never needs the portal password from you: if the session has expired, it uses whatever Chrome’s password manager autofills, and you never paste a password into a chat or into dassi’s settings. If the portal wants a 2FA code, that part stays yours, on your phone.
When to choose Comet
We’d stay with Comet if we liked it as a browser, wanted the same assistant on our phones, and found the credit change didn’t touch how we used it, or if we were already on Pro or Max with credits to spare at the end of the month.
When to choose dassi
If an AI that acts on pages was the reason you went looking in the first place, and you’d rather keep the browser you’ve already set up. The agent runs locally, and what it reads goes to the model provider you chose, via dassi’s relay if you’re on a plan with included credits.
If the reports about Control browser turn out to be wrong, or Perplexity reverses the change, half of this page stops mattering, and we’d be fine with that.