Perplexity’s Free Airtel Subscription Offer Drove 56 Million Downloads In India As Revenue Rises After Promotion Ends
A yearlong giveaway with Airtel turned Perplexity into one of India’s most downloaded AI apps, and even after the free offer ended, the company’s Indian revenue has kept climbing, an early signal that some users are genuinely willing to pay.
Highlights:
- Perplexity partnered with Airtel in July 2025 to offer a free 12 month Pro subscription
- The offer reached Airtel’s more than 360 million customers across India
- Downloads hit 56 million in India during the seven months the offer stayed open
- Monthly active users peaked near 22 million in October 2025
- Downloads fell over 90 percent after new redemptions closed in January 2026
- India in app purchase revenue still rose roughly 60 percent after the offer ended
Giving away a premium product for free is one of the oldest growth tactics in technology, and also one of the riskiest, because the real test never arrives during the giveaway itself, it arrives afterward, when the free tap finally closes and a company finds out how many of its new users were ever going to stick around once they had to actually pay. Perplexity, the AI-powered search and answer engine, has just reached that moment in India, and the early data paints a considerably more encouraging picture than most consumer technology giveaways in price-sensitive emerging markets typically produce.
The programme itself was announced in July 2025, when Perplexity partnered with Bharti Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, to offer a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro, a premium tier normally priced at around $200 annually, extended to Airtel’s enormous base of more than 360 million customers spanning mobile, broadband, and satellite television services. New customers could claim the offer up until January 16, 2026, after which redemptions closed, though existing users who had already activated their free subscription retained access for a full year measured from their individual activation date, meaning different cohorts of users have been reaching the end of their complimentary period on a rolling basis throughout this year rather than all at once.
The immediate impact of the giveaway on Perplexity’s download numbers in India was, by any measure, extraordinary. According to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch, Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India during July 2025 alone, a jump of 625 percent compared to the previous month, and notably more downloads in that single month than the company had accumulated across the entirety of the first half of the year combined. That momentum did not fade quickly either—over the full seven-month window during which new users could still claim the offer, Perplexity recorded 56 million total downloads in India, more than nine times the volume seen during the preceding seven-month period. Monthly active users climbed in parallel, surpassing 8.9 million within the first month of the promotion and eventually reaching a peak of roughly 22 million active users in October 2025, a scale of engagement that placed Perplexity firmly among India’s most actively used AI applications during that period.
Once new redemptions closed in mid-January, the download picture shifted dramatically, and predictably so. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded just 3.3 million times in India between February and July this year, a decline of more than 90 percent compared to the preceding six-month stretch, a drop that reflects the simple mechanical reality that free distribution through a telecom partner with hundreds of millions of subscribers naturally drives enormous install volume, and that volume necessarily collapses once that particular acquisition channel closes. What did not collapse alongside downloads, however, was actual user engagement. Monthly active users in India stood at nearly 14 million in July this year, down 37 percent from the October peak, but still more than five times higher than the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in India during the first half of 2025, before the Airtel partnership had even begun, a clear signal that the giveaway left the company with a durably larger Indian user base rather than simply a temporary spike that fully reverted once the promotional period ended.
“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, in an interview with TechCrunch
The more commercially significant finding sits in Perplexity’s revenue figures rather than its download or active user numbers, and it is the piece of this story that genuinely distinguishes it from countless other emerging market AI giveaways that have struggled to convert free users into paying ones. Sensor Tower data indicates Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August this year was approximately 60 percent higher than during the period when the Airtel offer remained available to new users, even as downloads were falling sharply over that same stretch. Looking specifically at the window immediately following the first wave of subscription expirations, between July 18 and August 12, average daily in-app purchase revenue in India ran 9 percent above the preceding 30-day average, and fully 27 percent above the company’s average for the first half of this year.
There is a genuinely important caveat worth stating plainly here rather than glossing over in favour of the more flattering revenue growth narrative. Because the free Airtel subscriptions defaulted to automatic renewal at the end of each user’s individual 12-month period unless a user actively opted out, at least a meaningful portion of this reported revenue increase likely reflects users who simply did not notice or act on cancelling their subscription in time, rather than a deliberate, informed decision to begin paying $200 annually for a product they had previously used for free. Distinguishing cleanly between genuine, intentional conversion and passive auto-renewal remains genuinely difficult using the publicly available data, and any complete assessment of how successful this giveaway strategy ultimately proves to be for Perplexity will need to account for that ambiguity honestly rather than treating every dollar of increased revenue as evidence of deliberate customer willingness to pay.
Framed within India’s broader technology market context, Perplexity’s experience carries relevance well beyond the company itself. India remains an enormous market by sheer population and internet subscriber numbers, but has historically proven notoriously difficult for technology companies, and AI companies in particular, to translate that scale into meaningful, sustainable revenue, given how strongly Indian consumers have typically resisted paying meaningfully for digital subscriptions when free or heavily discounted alternatives remain readily available. If even a modest single-digit percentage of the tens of millions who tried Perplexity Pro for free during the Airtel promotion convert into genuinely willing, long-term paying subscribers, that alone would represent a meaningful new revenue base that simply did not exist for the company in India prior to July 2025, even after accounting honestly for the auto-renewal ambiguity described above.
Taken together, Perplexity’s Airtel experiment offers a useful, still incomplete data point in the broader, ongoing question of whether subsidised AI access in price-sensitive emerging markets can eventually convert into durable, willing paying customer bases, or whether it primarily produces vanity download and active user metrics that evaporate the moment free access ends. The early signals here—sustained user engagement well above pre-promotion levels and genuinely rising revenue even as raw downloads collapsed—lean cautiously toward the more optimistic reading, though the unresolved question of how much of that revenue reflects deliberate conversion versus passive auto-renewal means the real verdict on this strategy will likely only become clear over the coming months, as more cohorts of free subscribers reach their individual renewal dates and actively choose, one way or another, whether Perplexity Pro is genuinely worth paying for.
