Perplexity’s free AI offer left it with millions more users in India
TechCrunch Jagmeet Singh
Perplexity gave free Pro access to Airtel's 360 million Indian customers, and downloads exploded then crashed once the offer closed. But revenue kept climbing even as new downloads dried up, hinting some users are actually paying.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Jagmeet Singh — read the original for the full story.
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A year ago, Perplexity made a huge bet in India: partner with Airtel, hand its 360 million subscribers a free year of Perplexity Pro, and see what sticks once the free ride ends. The first answer is now coming into view, and it's more interesting than a simple bust or boom.
The download numbers were staggering while the offer lasted. Perplexity pulled in 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, a 625% jump from June, according to Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch. Over the seven months new users could claim the deal, the app racked up 56 million downloads, more than nine times the prior seven-month stretch. Monthly active users doubled to 8.9 million in July and eventually topped out at 22 million in October. Appfigures saw the same spike from a different angle: daily downloads went from about 11,200 before launch to nearly 223,000 in the offer's first week, later climbing past 305,000 a day by mid-October, while ChatGPT and Claude downloads barely moved.
Then the free-redemption window closed on January 16, and the numbers fell off a cliff. Sensor Tower estimates downloads dropped more than 90% between February and July compared with the prior six months. Monthly active users slid from that October peak of 22 million to about 14 million in July, a 37% drop. But — and this is the part worth sitting with — that's still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million average monthly users Perplexity had before any of this started.
The stranger twist is what happened to money. Even as downloads collapsed, Sensor Tower found Perplexity's India revenue from February through mid-August rose about 60% compared with the giveaway period. And in the weeks after the earliest Airtel subscribers started hitting their renewal dates, daily revenue ran 9% above the prior month and 27% above the first-half average. Appfigures tells a similar story on a longer timeline, with Perplexity's monthly net mobile revenue in India climbing from roughly $34,000 in January 2025 to $156,000 by July 2026, pushing the company past $878,000 for the first seven months of the year.
Nobody's claiming victory yet, and both data firms are careful about that. The free subscriptions auto-renewed unless users cancelled, so some of that revenue bump could just be people forgetting to opt out rather than choosing to pay. Sensor Tower can't separate former Airtel users from other paying customers, and Appfigures' Michaeli points out the promotion's visibility alone might have pulled in new paying users who never touched the Airtel deal at all. Perplexity didn't respond to requests for comment, so for now the industry is left reading tea leaves.
What makes this matter beyond Perplexity is timing. OpenAI made ChatGPT Go free for a year in India in August 2025, and Google struck a similar deal giving Jio users 18 months of free AI Pro. Perplexity got there first, which means its users will be the first big group to find out whether cheap AI habits actually turn into paying subscriptions in a market famous for downloads and infamous for revenue.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Everyone loves to point out that India downloads apps like crazy and pays for approximately none of them, so watching Perplexity's revenue climb even as its download curve nosedived is genuinely the interesting story here — not the giveaway itself, which every AI company with a marketing budget is now copying. The honest read is that this looks promising but unproven: auto-renewal traps and hype-driven organic sign-ups can inflate the numbers just as easily as genuine conversion can. The real verdict lands months from now when the rest of Airtel's user base hits its renewal date, and if OpenAI and Google are smart, they're watching Perplexity's homework closely before their own free years run out.
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