Perplexity spent the previous yr working one of many largest AI progress experiments, giving its premium service away to prospects of Indian telecom large Airtel. Now, because the earliest of these free subscriptions expire, the outcomes are beginning to emerge, providing an early take a look at of whether or not bundling paid AI providers can create lasting customers and income after the giveaway ends.
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second largest telecom operator, to supply a free 12-month Perplexity Professional subscription, usually price about $200, to the Indian service’s 360 million prospects. New redemptions ended on January 16. Nonetheless, as a result of subscribers retained Professional for a yr from activation, the earliest customers began reaching the top of their free entry final month and needed to choose out of auto-renewal if they didn’t wish to be charged.
Perplexity’s AI giveaway had an instantaneous affect, because it noticed 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, based on information Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. That was up 625% from the earlier month and extra downloads in a single month than the 5.4 million Perplexity had amassed throughout all the first half of the yr.
This momentum was not restricted to the launch month of the Perplexity provide however continued nicely past it. Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads through the seven months that the provide was out there to new customers, greater than 9 occasions the previous seven-month interval, Sensor Tower estimated. Month-to-month energetic customers greater than doubled to eight.9 million in July and finally peaked at 22 million in October.
India has lengthy been a large marketplace for downloads for international expertise corporations, due to its huge inhabitants, greater than a billion web subscribers, and comparatively low cell information prices. The nation is the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China — with over 700 million customers — and has equally emerged as a significant supply of customers for generative AI providers. That scale has, nevertheless, proved significantly more durable to translate into income.
Particularly for AI corporations keen to subsidize entry in pursuit of scale, India’s market dynamics have made it a gorgeous testing floor. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others have more and more chased Indian customers with India-specific, lower-cost plans, free entry, and distribution partnerships, aiming to finally translate them into paying prospects.
Nonetheless, as soon as the window to assert the free Airtel subscription closed in January, Perplexity’s downloads fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million occasions in India between February and July, down greater than 90% from the previous six months.
What got here after the obtain increase?
The customers Perplexity had acquired didn’t disappear fairly so rapidly. Month-to-month energetic customers, which peaked at about 22 million in October, stood at practically 14 million in July — down 37% from that prime however nonetheless greater than 5 occasions the about 2.6 million month-to-month customers Perplexity averaged within the first half of 2025, per Sensor Tower.
“Whereas the time-sensitive nature of this promotion would naturally result in a decline in adoption after the provide interval, ongoing utilization has remained resilient,” Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, advised TechCrunch. Perplexity, he added, has “considerably extra customers” in India than it did within the six months earlier than the promotion.
Extra strikingly, Perplexity’s drop in downloads has not been accompanied by a decline in spending. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app buy and subscription income in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% from the interval when the Airtel provide was out there to new customers, regardless of downloads declined.
That pattern has continued even because the earliest Airtel subscribers have began shedding their free Perplexity Professional entry. From round July 18 by means of August 12, Perplexity’s common day by day in-app buy income in India, per Sensor Tower, was 9% increased than through the previous 30 days and 27% above the common for the primary half of 2026.
The rise offers us an early indication that some customers could also be keen to pay after getting accustomed to the premium service free of charge. However in fact, it doesn’t affirm that Airtel customers themselves are intentionally changing into paying subscribers.
The free subscriptions had been set to auto-renew, requiring customers who didn’t wish to proceed to cancel their service earlier than the renewal date to keep away from being charged. This makes it doable that among the improve displays customers who didn’t cancel in time moderately than those that actively selected to pay. Sensor Tower can not distinguish between these situations or separate former Airtel subscribers from different paying prospects.
Appfigures, one other app intelligence agency, additionally discovered that the Airtel deal dramatically modified Perplexity’s trajectory in India. The information Appfigures shared with TechCrunch signifies the preliminary progress was particular to Perplexity moderately than merely reflecting rising urge for food for AI apps general.
“I in contrast Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to make sure it wasn’t extra urge for food for AI, and it wasn’t,” Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli advised TechCrunch.
Within the week earlier than the Airtel provide launched, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 downloads a day in India, per Appfigures. That jumped twentyfold to almost 223,000 a day through the first week of the provide’s launch and continued climbing, hitting a mean of about 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October. To match, downloads of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remained broadly secure.
Appfigures additionally sees indicators that Perplexity emerged from the giveaway with a much bigger enterprise in India, although the promotional obtain increase disappeared. Perplexity’s month-to-month web cell income within the nation, per Appfigures, grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and reached $156,000 in July 2026. The AI firm generated an estimated $878,000 in India within the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025.
Michaeli cautioned in opposition to attributing all of that progress to Airtel customers turning into paying prospects. The big visibility generated by the promotion, he famous, can also have attracted paying customers who had been by no means a part of the giveaway.
Perplexity’s experiment has since turn into a part of a much wider wager by AI corporations in India. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year within the nation. Google additionally adopted Perplexity with a deal to supply its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio customers.
That makes Perplexity an early take a look at of whether or not the technique can work. Its Airtel deal started months earlier than the same strikes by OpenAI and Google. This additionally signifies that Perplexity customers are among the many first giant cohort in India to succeed in the purpose the place free premium AI turns right into a product they could should pay for.
India has already emerged because the world’s largest marketplace for generative AI app downloads however stays troublesome to monetize. AI corporations have been willing to trade near-term revenue for customers on this price-conscious market, striving to finally flip that scale and behavior into paying prospects.
That stated, the information can not but present what number of of Perplexity’s newly acquired customers will willingly pay as soon as their free yr runs out. That take a look at will play out over the approaching months as later cohorts of Airtel customers attain their renewal dates.
Perplexity didn’t reply to a request for remark.
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