Perplexity spent the past year running one of the biggest AI growth experiments, giving its premium service away to customers of Indian telecom giant Airtel. Now, as the earliest of those free subscriptions expire, the results are starting to emerge, offering an early test of whether bundling paid AI services can create lasting users and revenue after the giveaway ends. In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second biggest telecom operator, to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally worth about $200, to the Indian carrier’s 360 million customers.
New redemptions ended on January 16. However, because subscribers retained Pro for a year from activation, the earliest users began reaching the end of their free access last month and had to opt out of auto-renewal if they did not want to be charged. Perplexity’s AI giveaway had an immediate impact, as it saw 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, according to data Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch.
That was up 625% from the previous month and more downloads in a single month than the 5.4 million Perplexity had accumulated during the entire first half of the year. This momentum was not limited to the launch month of the Perplexity offer but persisted well beyond it. Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads during the seven months that the offer was available to new users, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period, Sensor Tower estimated.
Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and eventually peaked at 22 million in October. India has long been a massive market for downloads for global technology companies, thanks to its vast population, more than a billion internet subscribers, and relatively low mobile data costs. The country is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China — with over 700 million users — and has similarly emerged as a major source of users for generative AI services.
That scale has, however, proved considerably harder to translate into revenue. Specifically for AI companies willing to subsidize access in pursuit of scale, India’s market dynamics have made it an attractive testing ground. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others have increasingly chased Indian consumers with India-specific, lower-cost plans, free access, and distribution partnerships, aiming to eventually translate them into paying customers.
However, once the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed in January, Perplexity’s downloads fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July, down more than 90% from the preceding six months. The users Perplexity had acquired did not disappear quite so quickly.
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