Perplexity gave away a year of free AI to 360 million Indians. Here is what happened next.

Key points

• Perplexity partnered with Indian carrier Airtel in July 2025 to offer its $200-a-year Pro subscription free to up to 360 million customers.
• India downloads of the Perplexity app hit 5.9 million in July 2025 alone, up 625% from the previous month, according to app-analytics firm Sensor Tower.
• Monthly active users in India peaked at 22 million in October 2025, then settled at roughly 14 million by July 2026.
• Despite a 90%-plus drop in downloads after the free offer closed, Perplexity's in-app subscription revenue in India rose about 60% in the months that followed.
• OpenAI and Google have since launched their own free-subscription deals in India, making Perplexity's results an early blueprint for the whole industry.

One year ago, Perplexity, the AI-powered search and answer app, made a bet: give the product away for free in India and see who sticks around to pay. The vehicle was a partnership with Airtel, India's second-largest mobile carrier, which offered Perplexity Pro, normally priced at around $200 a year, at no cost to Airtel's 360 million customers. New sign-ups closed on 16 January 2026. Because each user kept the free year from the day they activated it, the first wave of subscribers only now face the moment of truth: pay up or cancel.

What did the giveaway actually produce?

The download numbers were striking. Sensor Tower, an app-market research company, recorded 5.9 million Perplexity downloads in India in July 2025 alone, a 625% jump from June. Over the full seven months the offer was available, the app was downloaded 56 million times, more than nine times the total for the seven months before the deal.

Monthly active users, meaning people who opened the app at least once in a given month, more than doubled to 8.9 million in July 2025 and peaked at 22 million in October. By July 2026 that figure had fallen to about 14 million, but that is still five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in early 2025.

Ariel Michaeli, co-founder and chief executive of Appfigures, another app-analytics firm, compared Perplexity's download curve to ChatGPT's and Claude's over the same period. Neither rival moved. "I compared Perplexity's downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to ensure it wasn't more appetite for AI, and it wasn't," he told TechCrunch. The surge belonged to Perplexity alone.

Does the revenue picture hold up?

This is where it gets genuinely interesting. After the free-offer window closed in January, India downloads collapsed by more than 90%. Revenue did not follow.

Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity's in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India rose roughly 60% in the February-to-mid-August 2026 period compared with the months when the Airtel offer was running. In the four weeks ending 12 August 2026, average daily revenue ran 27% above the first-half 2026 average.

Appfigures puts the monthly net mobile revenue figure at around $156,000 in July 2026, up from $34,000 in January 2025 and $70,000 in December 2025.

One important caveat: the subscriptions were set to auto-renew. Anyone who wanted out had to cancel before being charged. That means some of the revenue uptick may come from users who forgot to cancel rather than users who chose to pay. Sensor Tower cannot separate those two groups.

What does this mean for the broader AI industry?

India is already the world's largest market for generative AI app downloads. Converting those downloads into paying customers has proved much harder.

OpenAI launched a free year of its lower-cost ChatGPT Go plan in India in August 2025. Google followed with an 18-month free deal for eligible users of Reliance Jio, the country's largest carrier. Both companies are now running essentially the same experiment Perplexity ran first.

Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment. The clearest read on whether any of this truly works will come over the next several months, as later cohorts of Airtel subscribers hit their own renewal dates.

Watch for: Unexpected charges on a phone bill or app-store statement from a service you signed up for during a free promotion. If you joined a bundled AI trial, check your subscription settings before the anniversary date so any renewal is a choice, not a surprise.