Perplexity spent the past year testing a big growth play in India: in July 2025 it partnered with Bharti Airtel — India’s second-largest telecom operator — to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, typically worth about $200, to Airtel’s roughly 360 million customers. New redemptions for the offer closed on January 16, 2026. Because each free subscription was valid for a year from activation, the earliest participants began to lose free access starting in July 2026.
Downloads and active users
Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch show the promotion had an immediate effect. Perplexity’s app was downloaded 5.9 million times in India in July 2025, a 625% increase from the previous month and more downloads in that single month than during the entire first half of the year. Over the seven months when the offer was available to new users, Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity recorded about 56 million downloads — more than nine times the preceding seven-month period.
Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July 2025 and peaked around 22 million in October 2025. After the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed, downloads fell sharply: Sensor Tower estimates just 3.3 million downloads in India between February and July 2026, a drop of more than 90% compared with the prior six months. Despite that, users did not disappear overnight — monthly active users were nearly 14 million in July 2026, down 37% from the October peak but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025.
Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told TechCrunch that “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.” He added that Perplexity now has “significantly more users” in India than it did in the six months before the promotion.
Revenue and conversion signals
Notably, the drop in downloads was not matched by a fall in in-app spending. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August 2026 rose about 60% compared with the period when the Airtel offer was still available to new users, even as downloads declined.
As the earliest Airtel subscribers began losing free access, Perplexity’s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India from about July 18 through August 12, 2026 was 9% higher than the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026. That suggests some users may be willing to pay after experiencing the premium service for free.
However, Sensor Tower notes an important caveat: the free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so users who did not cancel before renewal were charged. The data cannot distinguish between deliberate conversions (users actively choosing to pay) and accidental renewals, nor can it separate former Airtel recipients from other paying customers.
Confirmation from Appfigures and additional metrics
Appfigures, another app intelligence firm, also found the Airtel deal dramatically changed Perplexity’s trajectory in India and that the initial growth was specific to Perplexity rather than a general surge in appetite for AI apps. Ariel Michaeli, Appfigures co-founder and CEO, said he compared Perplexity downloads with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude and did not see a similar jump for those apps.
According to Appfigures, Perplexity’s average daily downloads in India rose from about 11,200 in the week before the Airtel offer to nearly 223,000 per day in the offer’s first week, and continued climbing to an average of roughly 305,000 per day between mid-September and mid-October. Appfigures’ data also show Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from roughly $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December 2025 and reached $156,000 in July 2026. Appfigures estimates Perplexity generated about $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025.
Michaeli warned that not all of this growth should be directly attributed to Airtel users converting to paid subscribers; the promotion’s visibility could have attracted paying users who never participated in the giveaway.
Broader industry context
Perplexity’s Airtel experiment is part of a wider pattern: AI firms have increasingly pursued India with locally priced plans, free access, and distribution partnerships to build scale in a market with more than a billion internet users but strong price sensitivity. After Perplexity’s deal, OpenAI in August 2025 made its lower-cost ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in India, and Google offered its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users.
India has become the world’s largest market by generative AI app downloads, but monetization remains challenging. Companies have been willing to sacrifice near-term revenue to gain users in the hope of converting them later. Perplexity’s case offers an early test of whether free, bundled premium access can create lasting paying customers. The definitive metric — how many of the newly acquired users willingly continue as paying subscribers after the free year — will become clearer in the coming months as later cohorts reach their renewal dates.
Perplexity did not respond to requests for comment.
