Perplexity Pro’s free offer for subscribers of Indian telecommunications company Airtel significantly expanded the service’s presence in India, with early signs that some usage continued and revenue increased after the download surge subsided. However, the available data does not yet determine whether users who received the subscription for free actually chose to pay when the offer period ended.
A sharp increase in downloads and usage
Perplexity began its partnership with Airtel in July 2025, when it made a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally worth about $200, available to the telecommunications company’s 360 million customers. New users could no longer activate the subscription after January 16, while existing subscribers retained the service for one year from the date of activation.
According to Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch, the Perplexity app recorded about 5.9 million downloads in India during July 2025, an increase of 625% compared with the previous month. During the seven months in which the offer remained available to new users, total downloads reached 56 million—more than nine times the comparable previous period.
Monthly active users increased to 8.9 million in July and then peaked at 22 million in October. After registration for the offer closed, downloads fell to only 3.3 million between February and July, a decline of more than 90% from the previous six months.
Users did not disappear at the same rate
Despite the decline in downloads, monthly active users totaled about 14 million in July—37% below the October peak, but still more than five times the average for the first half of 2025, which was approximately 2.6 million monthly users.
Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, said usage remained resilient despite the temporary nature of the offer, and that Perplexity now has far more users in India than it did before the campaign.
Revenue increased, but the reason remains unclear
Sensor Tower estimated that in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India increased by about 60% between February and mid-August compared with the period when the offer was available to new users. Between July 18 and August 12, average daily in-app revenue increased 9% over the previous 30 days and 27% over the average for the first half of 2026.
Appfigures data indicates that net monthly mobile revenue in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December, and then to $156,000 in July 2026. It also estimated Perplexity’s revenue in India during the first seven months of 2026 at approximately $878,000, an increase of 16% over the total for 2025.
What does this mean for the free-subscription experiment?
The results offer an early indication that providing a paid artificial intelligence service for free may leave behind a larger user base and higher revenue after a campaign ends. However, automatic renewal makes the figures more difficult to interpret: some users may have begun paying because they did not cancel their subscriptions before the renewal date, rather than because they consciously decided to become paid subscribers.
Sensor Tower also cannot separate former Airtel users from the other customers who pay, so revenue growth cannot be directly linked to the offer. Nevertheless, Appfigures found that the increase was specific to Perplexity, while downloads of ChatGPT and Claude remained roughly stable during the same period.
This experiment comes ahead of similar offers from OpenAI, which made its cheaper ChatGPT Go plan available for free for one year in India during August 2025, and Google, which offered an 18-month free AI Pro subscription to eligible Reliance Jio users. The value of this strategy will become clearer in the coming months as the free periods end for more Airtel users.