Perplexity conducted one of the largest AI growth experiments last year, delivering premium services to customers of Indian telecom giant Airtel. Now, with the earliest of these free subscriptions expiring, we are starting to see results, and an early test of whether bundling paid AI services can generate ongoing users and revenue beyond the giveaway period.
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second-largest carrier, to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, typically worth approximately $200, to the carrier’s 360 million customers in India. New redemptions ended January 16th. However, because subscribers kept Pro for a year from activation, the earliest users started reaching the end of their free access last month and had to opt out of auto-renewal if they didn’t want to be charged.
Perplexity’s AI benefits had an immediate impact, with 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, according to data Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. That’s a 625% month-over-month increase, and the number of downloads in a month exceeds the 5.4 million downloads Perplexity accumulated in the entire first half of this year.
This momentum wasn’t limited to the launch month of the Perplexity offer, it continued long after. Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads in the seven months the offer was available to new users. That’s more than nine times more than the previous seven months. Sensor Tower estimates. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and eventually peaked at 22 million in October.
India has long been a large download market for global technology companies, thanks to its huge population, over 1 billion internet subscribers, and relatively low mobile data prices. The country is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China, with more than 700 million users, and has similarly emerged as a major source of users for generative AI services. But converting that scale into revenue has proven to be quite difficult.
India’s market dynamics make it an attractive testing ground, especially for AI companies that subsidize access in pursuit of scale. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others are increasingly pursuing Indian consumers with India-specific low-cost plans, free access, and distribution partnerships, with the aim of eventually converting them into paying customers.
However, when the window to claim Airtel’s free subscription closed in January, Perplexity’s download numbers plummeted. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July, a decline of more than 90% compared to the previous six months.
What happened after the download boom?
The users Perplexity acquired didn’t disappear all that quickly. Monthly active users peaked at about 22 million in October, but rose to nearly 14 million in July. That’s down 37% from that high, but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025, according to Sensor Tower.
“Due to the time-sensitive nature of this promotion, adoption naturally declines after the offer period, but continued usage remains resilient,” Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told TechCrunch. He added that Perplexity’s user base in India has “significantly increased” compared to the six months prior to the promotion.
Even more surprisingly, Perplexity’s decline in downloads has not been accompanied by a decline in spending. Despite the decline in downloads, Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchases and subscription revenue in India from February to mid-August increased by about 60% compared to the period when Airtel’s offer was available to new users.
This trend continues even as Airtel’s early subscribers started losing free Perplexity Pro access. From approximately July 18 to August 12, Perplexity’s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India per sensor tower was 9% higher than the previous 30 days and 27% higher than the H1 2026 average.
This increase is an early indication that some users may be willing to pay after getting used to the free premium service. But of course, this does not prove that Airtel users themselves are intentionally converting to paying subscribers.
Free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, and users who did not wish to continue had to cancel the service before their renewal date to avoid being charged. Therefore, some of the increase may reflect users who did not cancel by the deadline, rather than those who actively chose to pay. Sensor Tower cannot differentiate between these scenarios or distinguish former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers.
Appfigures, another app intelligence company, also found that the Airtel deal dramatically changed Perplexity’s trajectory in India. Data Appfigures shared with TechCrunch shows that the initial growth was unique to Perplexity, rather than simply reflecting increased demand for AI apps overall.
“We compared Perplexity downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to make sure interest in AI wasn’t growing, and that wasn’t the case,” Ariel Michaeli, co-founder and CEO of Appfigures, told TechCrunch.
According to Appfigures, Perplexity was downloaded an average of around 11,200 times per day in India in the week before Airtel’s offer was launched. This number increased 20x to nearly 223,000 per day in the first week of the offer, and continued to rise, reaching an average of approximately 305,000 per day from mid-September to mid-October. By comparison, downloads for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude have been fairly stable.
Appfigures also sees signs that Perplexity has emerged from deals with larger businesses in India, even though the promotional download boom has passed. Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India increased from approximately $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and reached $156,000 in July 2026, according to Appfigures. The AI company generated an estimated $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, an increase of 16% compared to all of 2025.
Michaeli cautioned against attributing all of that growth to Airtel users becoming paying customers. He noted that the huge amount of awareness generated by the promotion may have also attracted paying users who had never participated in the offer.
Perplexity’s experiment then became part of a broader bet by Indian AI companies. In August 2025, OpenAI made its low-cost ChatGPT Go plan free for one year in Japan. Google followed Perplexity’s lead and signed a deal to offer eligible Reliance Jio users a free 18-month AI Pro subscription.
So Perplexity is an early test of whether the strategy works. The company’s deal with Airtel comes months before similar moves by OpenAI and Google. This also means that Perplexity users are one of the first large groups in India to reach the stage where free premium AI turns into a paid product.
India has already emerged as the world’s largest market for downloads of generated AI apps, but monetization remains challenging. AI companies are eager to trade short-term revenue with users in this price-driven market, ultimately seeking to convert their scale and habits into paying customers.
That said, the data still doesn’t tell us how many of Perplexity’s newly acquired users will be willing to pay after the free year ends. This test will be carried out for the next few months till the renewal date for subsequent groups of Airtel users.
Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.
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