Giving away $200-per-year subscriptions to 360 million people sounds like a terrible business decision. But Perplexity’s bet on India may actually be working, at least by the early numbers.
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, to offer 12 months of Perplexity Pro free to Airtel’s customer base. The deal closed to new redemptions in January 2026, but because subscribers kept Pro for a full year from activation, the first wave of users only started losing their free access last month. That means we’re now getting the first real look at whether a free-to-paid conversion strategy can work at this scale.
According to TechCrunch, Perplexity saw 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025 alone, a 625% jump from the prior month and more than the 5.4 million downloads it had accumulated across the entire first half of the year. Over the seven months the offer was available, Perplexity racked up 56 million downloads in India, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July 2025 and peaked at 22 million in October.
Then the offer closed, and downloads cratered. Between February and July 2026, Perplexity was downloaded just 3.3 million times in India, down more than 90% from the six months prior. That kind of collapse is exactly what skeptics would predict from a promotion-driven spike. But the more interesting number is what happened to revenue.
Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India rose about 60% between February and mid-August compared to the period when the Airtel offer was live. And from around July 18 through August 12, as the earliest free subscriptions began expiring, average daily revenue was 9% higher than the preceding 30 days and 27% above the first-half 2026 average. App intelligence firm Appfigures puts Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India at roughly $156,000 in July 2026, up from about $34,000 in January 2025.
There’s a caveat worth flagging. The Airtel subscriptions were set to auto-renew, meaning users had to actively cancel to avoid being charged. Some portion of that revenue bump may reflect people who simply forgot to cancel rather than those who made a deliberate choice to keep paying. The data can’t separate those two groups, and Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, monthly active users in July stood at nearly 14 million, down 37% from the October peak but still more than five times Perplexity’s pre-deal baseline in India. That retention matters. Appfigures co-founder Ariel Michaeli also noted that the download surge was specific to Perplexity, not a rising tide for AI apps generally. ChatGPT and Claude downloads remained broadly flat during the same period.
The broader context here is that India is now the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads but one of the hardest to monetize. OpenAI and Google have both made similar moves since, with ChatGPT Go going free for a year in India last August and Google offering its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users. Perplexity just got there first, which means its Airtel cohort is the first large group in the country to face the moment where free AI becomes something you might actually have to pay for.
How that plays out over the next few months, as later cohorts hit their renewal dates, will tell the industry a lot about whether subsidized access in price-sensitive markets can build a real business or just a temporary audience.
