Perplexity’s India experiment is moving from growth story to revenue test. After giving Airtel customers a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, the AI company gained millions of users in one of the world’s largest technology markets. Now the earliest subscribers are reaching the end of free access, and the results are beginning to show what happens after the promotion fades.
A massive distribution bet
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second biggest telecom operator, to make Perplexity Pro available free for 12 months to the carrier’s 360 million customers. The subscription was normally worth about $200.
New redemptions ended on January 16, but the offer did not end for everyone at the same time. Users kept Pro for a year from activation, which means the first subscribers began losing free access last month. Those who did not want to continue had to opt out of auto-renewal before being charged.
The immediate effect was dramatic. Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch showed 5.9 million Perplexity app downloads in India in July 2025. That was up 625% from the previous month and exceeded the 5.4 million downloads Perplexity had recorded in the entire first half of the year.
Downloads surged, then fell back
The Airtel offer did not create only a short launch spike. During the seven months when new users could claim the promotion, Sensor Tower estimated Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads in India. That was more than nine times the preceding seven-month period.
Monthly active users also climbed sharply. They more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and later peaked at 22 million in October.
Once the window to claim the free subscription closed in January, the download surge weakened. Sensor Tower estimated that Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July, down more than 90% from the preceding six months.
That decline matters because it shows how much of the download momentum was tied to the promotion itself. But downloads are only one part of the picture. The larger question is whether people who tried the paid product for free kept using it after the campaign stopped bringing in new redemptions.
Usage stayed higher than before
The user base did not disappear as quickly as downloads dropped. Sensor Tower data showed monthly active users at nearly 14 million in July. That was down 37% from the October peak of about 22 million, but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025.
“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, told TechCrunch.
Yousef added that Perplexity has “significantly more users” in India than it had in the six months before the promotion. That is the strongest sign that the Airtel deal did more than produce a temporary chart spike. It left Perplexity with a larger ongoing audience in India.
Appfigures, another app intelligence firm, also found that the Airtel deal changed Perplexity’s path in India. Its data indicated the jump was specific to Perplexity rather than a general rise in AI app interest.
“I compared Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to ensure it wasn’t more appetite for AI, and it wasn’t,” Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli told TechCrunch.
According to Appfigures, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 downloads a day in India in the week before the Airtel offer launched. That rose twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day during the first week of the offer and kept climbing, reaching an average of about 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October. Downloads of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remained broadly stable.
The harder test is monetization
India is a major market for global technology companies because of its vast population, more than a billion internet subscribers, relatively low mobile data costs, and over 700 million smartphone users. It is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China and has become a major source of users for generative AI services.
Turning that scale into revenue is harder. AI companies including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others have pursued Indian consumers with India-specific lower-cost plans, free access, and distribution partnerships. The goal is to build usage first and convert some of that audience into paying customers later.
Perplexity’s revenue signals are notable because spending did not fall along with downloads. Sensor Tower estimated that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% compared with the period when the Airtel offer was available to new users.
That trend continued as the earliest Airtel subscribers began losing free Pro access. From around July 18 through August 12, Sensor Tower estimated Perplexity’s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India was 9% higher than during the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026.
Appfigures also saw a larger business emerging. It estimated Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and reached $156,000 in July 2026. The company generated an estimated $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025.
What the numbers still cannot prove
The early revenue increase suggests that some users may be willing to pay after using the premium service for free. But the available data does not prove that Airtel users are intentionally converting into paid subscribers.
There are two important limits in the data:
- Free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so some revenue may come from users who did not cancel in time.
- Sensor Tower cannot separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers.
Michaeli also cautioned against crediting all revenue growth to Airtel users converting. The visibility created by the promotion may have brought in paying users who never joined through the giveaway.
That is why Perplexity remains an early test rather than a final answer. OpenAI later made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in India, and Google followed Perplexity with a deal to offer its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users.
Perplexity moved earlier than those similar efforts, which makes its India results especially useful to watch. The coming months will show more clearly how many users keep paying as later Airtel cohorts reach their renewal dates. Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.