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 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 activation, the first wave of subscribers only now face the moment of truth: pay up or cancel.

What did the giveaway actually produce?

The download spike was hard to ignore. Sensor Tower, an app-market research firm, recorded 5.9 million Perplexity downloads in India in July 2025 alone, a 625% jump from June. Over the full seven months the offer ran, the app was downloaded 56 million times, more than nine times the total from the seven months before the deal.

Users who opened the app at least once in a given month numbered 8.9 million in July 2025, peaked at 22 million in October, then fell to around 14 million by July 2026. That last figure is still five times the roughly 2.6 million who used the app on that basis in early 2025.

Ariel Michaeli, co-founder and CEO of Appfigures, a separate app-analytics firm, checked whether the surge was simply a rising tide for AI apps overall. It was not. ChatGPT and Claude downloads held flat across the same stretch. "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 growth belonged to Perplexity alone.

Does the revenue picture hold up?

After the free-offer window closed in January, India downloads fell 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 live. In the four weeks ending 12 August 2026, average daily revenue ran 27% above the first-half 2026 average.

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

One caveat matters here. The subscriptions auto-renewed, so anyone who did not want to continue had to cancel before being charged. Some of the revenue uptick may reflect users who missed that deadline rather than users who chose to keep paying. Sensor Tower cannot separate those two groups, and Michaeli noted that the promotion's visibility may also have attracted paying customers who were never part of the Airtel deal at all.

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 revenue has proved far harder, as we noted in our coverage of Accel's $550 million India fund on 11 August 2026.

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 Reliance Jio users. Both companies are now running 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 reach their own renewal dates.

The practical thing to do right now: check your phone's subscription settings for any AI trial you joined through a carrier bundle. Auto-renewal is the default. A cancellation takes thirty seconds; an unexpected charge takes weeks to dispute.