Perplexity's year-long free subscription giveaway with Indian carrier Airtel produced 56 million app downloads across seven months, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period, according to Sensor Tower data. The deal, launched in July 2025, gave Airtel's 360 million customers a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription normally priced at about $200. The first cohort of those free subscriptions began expiring last month, providing the earliest read on whether subsidized AI can produce paying customers on the other side.
The launch impact was immediate. Perplexity saw 5.9 million India downloads in July 2025 alone, up 625% from the prior month and more than the 5.4 million it had accumulated across the entire first half of the year. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million that month, then climbed to a peak of 22 million in October.
India is the largest market in the world for generative AI app downloads, with more than a billion internet subscribers and over 700 million smartphone users. It is also one of the hardest markets to monetize, which is why Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have all tested subsidized entry points. Perplexity moved first at scale through Airtel.
Key facts
- 01Perplexity hit 56 million India downloads during the seven months of the Airtel offer, more than 9x the prior seven-month period.
- 02Monthly active users peaked at 22 million in October, then settled at 14 million in July 2026 — still 5x the pre-deal average of 2.6 million.
- 03In-app revenue in India rose ~60% between February and mid-August 2026 versus the giveaway window, despite downloads falling 90%.
- 04Perplexity generated an estimated $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025.
- 05OpenAI made ChatGPT Go free for a year in India in August 2025; Google offered 18 months of AI Pro to Reliance Jio users.
New redemptions closed on January 16, and downloads fell off a cliff. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July 2026, a decline of more than 90% from the preceding six months. But the user base held up better than the download curve suggested.
Monthly active users stood at nearly 14 million in July 2026, down 37% from the October peak but still more than five times the 2.6 million monthly average Perplexity posted in the first half of 2025. Sensor Tower's Abe Yousef told TechCrunch that Perplexity has significantly more users in India than it did in the six months before the promotion.
“While the time-sensitive nature of this promotion would naturally lead to a decline in adoption after the offer period, ongoing usage has remained resilient”— Abe Yousef, Senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower
The revenue picture is the more interesting one. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity's in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August 2026 rose about 60% versus the giveaway window, even as downloads collapsed. Between July 18 and August 12 — the stretch when the earliest Airtel subscribers began hitting their renewal date — average daily in-app revenue ran 9% above the preceding 30 days and 27% above the first-half 2026 average.
That signal is muddied by mechanics. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, meaning some of the paid conversions may reflect users who missed the cancel window rather than active buyers. Sensor Tower cannot separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers, so the true opt-in rate is not yet visible.
App intelligence firm Appfigures reached similar conclusions on the growth side. In the week before the Airtel offer launched, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 India downloads per day. That jumped roughly twentyfold to 223,000 per day in the first week of the deal and hit 305,000 per day between mid-September and mid-October. Downloads of ChatGPT and Claude stayed broadly flat over the same period.
Appfigures pegs Perplexity's monthly net mobile revenue in India at about $34,000 in January 2025, $70,000 in December 2025, and $156,000 by July 2026. Cumulative India revenue reached an estimated $878,000 in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025. Appfigures CEO Ariel Michaeli cautioned that some of the revenue lift likely came from the promotion's visibility drawing in paying users who were never part of the giveaway itself.
The strategy has since spread. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in India. Google followed with an 18-month free AI Pro subscription for eligible Reliance Jio users. Perplexity is the first to reach the post-giveaway renewal cliff, which makes its conversion data a leading indicator for what OpenAI and Google should expect in 2026 and 2027.
The unresolved question is retention economics. Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment, and neither Sensor Tower nor Appfigures can yet distinguish deliberate paid conversions from failed cancellations. Later cohorts of Airtel users will hit their renewal dates over the coming months, and those numbers will determine whether the giveaway produced a durable subscriber base or a one-time habituation spike.
For Perplexity, the India experiment already looks like a win on the metrics that matter for a growth-stage AI company: user base multiplied more than fivefold and revenue is now compounding month over month off a higher floor. The harder read is for the broader field. If India converts even a mid-single-digit percentage of these subsidized users to paid, the subsidized-onboarding model becomes the default playbook for large price-sensitive markets. If it doesn't, OpenAI and Google are about to spend a lot of money to learn the same lesson.
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