Perplexity ran one of the biggest AI growth experiments by giving its premium Pro subscription, normally worth about $200, free for 12 months to customers of Indian telecom giant Airtel. The offer launched in July 2025, with new redemptions ending on January 16; because subscribers kept Pro for a year from activation, the earliest users started hitting the end of their free access last month and had to opt out of auto-renewal to avoid being charged.

The giveaway had an immediate effect. Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch shows Perplexity saw 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the previous month and more than the 5.4 million downloads it had accumulated during the entire first half of the year. That momentum persisted: Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads during the seven months the offer was available to new users, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and peaked at 22 million in October.

India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market, with over 700 million users, and has become a major source of generative AI app users, though monetization has proven difficult. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others have pursued Indian consumers with lower-cost plans, free access, and distribution partnerships. Once the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed in January, Perplexity‘s downloads fell sharply: Sensor Tower estimates 3.3 million downloads in India between February and July, down more than 90% from the preceding six months. The users acquired did not disappear as quickly. Monthly active users stood at nearly 14 million in July, down 37% from the 22 million peak but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025. “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, told TechCrunch.

More strikingly, the drop in downloads was not accompanied by a decline in spending. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity‘s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% from the period when the Airtel offer was available, despite lower downloads. From roughly July 18 through August 12, Perplexity‘s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India was 9% higher than during the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026. But the source notes this does not confirm Airtel users are deliberately converting into paying subscribers. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so some of the increase may reflect users who did not cancel in time rather than those who actively chose to pay. Sensor Tower cannot distinguish between these scenarios or separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers.

Appfigures, another app intelligence firm, found the Airtel deal dramatically changed Perplexity‘s trajectory in India and that the initial growth was specific to Perplexity rather than reflecting broader appetite for AI apps. In the week before the offer launched, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 downloads a day in India; that jumped twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day during the first week and hit roughly 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October. Downloads of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remained broadly stable. Appfigures also sees Perplexity emerging from the giveaway with a bigger business: monthly net mobile revenue in the country grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and reached $156,000 in July 2026, with an estimated $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025. Michaeli cautioned against attributing all of that growth to Airtel users converting, since the promotion’s visibility may also have attracted paying users who were never part of the giveaway.

The experiment has become part of a broader wager by AI companies in India. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in the country, and Google followed with a deal offering its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users. Perplexity‘s Airtel deal began months before those moves, making it an early test of the strategy, and its users are among the first large cohort in India to reach the point where free premium AI becomes a product they may have to pay for. The data cannot yet show how many newly acquired users will willingly pay once their free year runs out; that test will play out over the coming months as later Airtel user cohorts reach renewal dates. Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.