Perplexity Spaces is brilliant. It's also built for one person.
Comet just went free, which means anyone can upload family documents to a Perplexity Space and ask questions. The catch: Spaces are personal accounts. Your spouse, your parents, and your adult kids each need their own subscription, their own uploads, and their own answers. Archevi is the family-shared version of the same idea. With PII redacted before the AI ever sees it, and your files hosted in Canada.
May 2026: Comet went free, but Spaces are still single-user
Perplexity Comet dropped from $200/month Max-only to free this month, opening Spaces (Perplexity's document Q&A feature) to every user. It's a real upgrade for personal research. For family document workflows, it surfaces the same wall that's been there since launch: one Space per person, no shared family vault, no way to give your spouse or parent the same answers about the same wills, policies, and tax slips.
Archevi was designed for the household from day one. Every member sees the same documents and asks the same questions, and gets answers grounded in the same source files.
What you actually pay for AI on your family's documents
Per user, per month. Five family members = $100/month. Comet free tier lacks Pro reasoning + unlimited Spaces.
- Document upload + Q&A inside personal Spaces
- No shared family Space. Each member uploads separately
- No PII redaction layer before queries hit the model
- Hosting + data residency not publicly disclosed
Per family, per month. One shared vault. Every member gets full AI on the same documents.
- Shared family vault. Upload once, everyone can ask
- PII redacted automatically before the AI ever sees the document
- Hosted in Canada (Toronto), PIPEDA-aligned
- Built around wills, policies, tax slips, not blog research
What Archevi does that Perplexity Spaces doesn't
Family-shared vault
Upload Mom's will once. You, your sibling, and your parent can each ask questions about it from their own login. Perplexity Spaces are personal. There's no way to share one across accounts.
PII redacted before the AI sees it
Names, SIN numbers, account numbers, and addresses are stripped before any query touches the language model, then restored in your answer. Perplexity has no equivalent privacy layer.
Canadian data residency
Your documents live in Toronto, on infrastructure that's PIPEDA-aligned. Perplexity's hosting and data handling for uploaded files aren't publicly disclosed.
Built for living documents, not blog research
Archevi knows wills, insurance policies, tax slips, medical records, and emergency contacts. It tracks expiry dates and surfaces what's due. Perplexity is a research tool that happens to accept uploads.
Feature-by-feature comparison
| Feature | Archevi | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|
Shared family vault, one upload, all members can ask Spaces are personal to one account | ||
PII redaction before queries reach the model Names, SINs, account numbers stripped automatically | ||
Canadian data residency (PIPEDA) DigitalOcean Toronto Hosting + handling not publicly disclosed | ||
Documents never used for AI training Opt-out exists, not the default | ||
Expiry tracking for passports, insurance, licences | ||
Per-document Q&A with cited passages | ||
General web research + news synthesis This is what Perplexity is built for | ||
Comet browser with agentic actions | ||
Flat family pricing (no per-seat) $6 to $24/month for the whole household $20/user. 5 members = $100/month |
Why Spaces feels close, but isn't the answer
Perplexity Spaces is one of the cleanest implementations of document Q&A on the market. The retrieval is fast, the citations are honest, and the new Comet free tier makes it usable for anyone with a few hours and some files to upload.
The problem isn't the technology. It's the unit of ownership. A Space belongs to a Perplexity account. Your spouse can't see your Space. Your parent can't see your Space. Your adult child can't see your Space. If you want a single family conversation about Mom's estate documents, you each upload the same files into your own Space and each have a slightly different conversation.
That's not how families actually use documents. The whole point of a family vault is that one person uploads Mom's will, and three weeks later when something happens, whoever needs the answer can get it. Spaces, by design, fragment that.
Privacy is the other gap. Perplexity is transparent about being a research engine. Your queries hit external models and contribute to product behaviour. There's no automatic PII redaction between your document and the model. For a will, an insurance policy, or a tax slip, that's a different kind of file than the news article you'd normally ask Perplexity about.
Archevi is purpose-built for the household. One vault, every member, PII stripped before any query, Canadian hosting. Use Perplexity Pro for the rest of your research life. Archevi for the documents you'd never paste into a search bar.
What Perplexity does better, and we'll say so
Perplexity's research workflow is genuinely excellent. The Comet browser, the Pro reasoning modes, the source citations on news and academic queries. None of that is matched by Archevi, and we don't try. If you want one tool for general web research, news synthesis, and academic deep dives, Pro is worth its $20.
Perplexity also moves faster on retrieval quality and model integration than a small team can. New models reach Pro within days of release. Spaces benefit from the same underlying RAG improvements that power everything else.
Archevi isn't a Perplexity replacement. It's the version you reach for when the documents in question are wills, policies, tax slips, and emergency contacts (the files your family actually shares) and when the household, not the individual, is the unit you're trying to support.
One vault for the whole family. PII stripped, hosted in Canada.
Start on the Core plan for $6 CAD/month. Upload Mom's will once, and let anyone in the family ask questions about it from their own login.