Perplexity's free Airtel deal leaves it with millions more users

Perplexity spent the past year running one of the biggest AI growth experiments yet, giving its premium service away free to customers of Airtel, India’s second-biggest telecom operator. As the earliest of those free subscriptions expire, the results are starting to emerge — an early test of whether bundling paid AI services can create lasting users and revenue once a giveaway ends.

In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally worth about $200, to the carrier’s 360 million customers. New redemptions ended January 16, but because subscribers kept Pro for a year from activation, the earliest users only began reaching the end of their free access last month.

The impact was immediate: Perplexity saw 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the previous month and more than it had accumulated in the entire first half of the year, according to data Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. Downloads reached 56 million over the seven months the offer was open to new users — more than nine times the prior seven-month period — and monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July, eventually peaking at 22 million in October.

Once the window to claim the free subscription closed in January, downloads fell sharply — down more than 90% between February and July compared with the preceding six months, to 3.3 million, Sensor Tower estimates. Monthly active users, meanwhile, slipped 37% from their October peak to nearly 14 million in July, still more than five times Perplexity’s roughly 2.6 million average monthly users before the promotion began.

Notably, the drop in downloads hasn’t come with a drop in spending: Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity’s India in-app purchase and subscription revenue rose about 60% between February and mid-August compared with the offer period, even as downloads fell. “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,” said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

Appfigures found a similar pattern, estimating that Perplexity’s daily India downloads jumped twentyfold, from about 11,200 before the deal to nearly 223,000 in its first week, later climbing to around 305,000 a day. Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli said he compared Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT’s and Claude’s to check whether the surge reflected broader AI appetite — and found it didn’t; downloads of the other two apps stayed roughly flat.

Perplexity’s Airtel wager has since become part of a broader trend: OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in India last August, and Google offered its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users. India remains the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads but is notoriously hard to monetize — a test of whether giveaways like Perplexity’s can convert scale and habit into paying customers in the months ahead.

Why it matters

Perplexity’s experiment gives AI companies subsidizing access in India and beyond a data point: even after a giveaway ends, a meaningful share of users kept paying, suggesting scale bought today can eventually convert into revenue.