Perplexity’s year-long experiment of giving away its premium AI service to hundreds of millions of Airtel customers in India has produced a clear verdict on user growth — but the question of whether free users become paying customers remains unresolved. New data from Sensor Tower and Appfigures, shared with TechCrunch, shows that while the promotional download boom has faded, monthly active users have remained far above pre-offer levels, and revenue has actually climbed since the giveaway ended.
The giveaway that reshaped Perplexity’s India trajectory
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription — normally worth about $200 — to the carrier’s 360 million customers. The offer was available for redemption until January 16, 2026, and because each user’s free period began at activation, the earliest adopters saw their access expire starting in mid-July 2026, with auto-renewal kicking in unless they opted out.
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The impact was immediate. Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, a 625% jump from the previous month and more than the 5.4 million downloads it had accumulated in the entire first half of that year, according to Sensor Tower. Over the seven months the offer was open, Perplexity logged 56 million downloads in India — more than nine times the preceding seven-month period. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July 2025 and peaked at 22 million in October.
The surge was specific to Perplexity, not a broader AI appetite. Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli told TechCrunch that downloads of ChatGPT and Claude remained broadly stable during the same period, confirming the promotion drove the spike.
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Post-promotion reality: downloads fell, usage and revenue didn’t collapse
Once the redemption window closed in January, downloads plummeted. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded just 3.3 million times in India between February and July 2026, down more than 90% from the preceding six months. Yet monthly active users, while down 37% from the October peak, still stood at nearly 14 million in July — more than five times the 2.6 million average 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 notably, revenue has not followed the download decline. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August 2026 rose about 60% compared to the period when the Airtel offer was available to new users. From around July 18 through August 12, average daily in-app purchase revenue was 9% higher than the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026.
Appfigures data paints a similar picture. Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $156,000 in July 2026. The company generated an estimated $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from all of 2025.
What the revenue bump does and doesn’t prove
The increase in revenue offers an early signal that some users may be willing to pay after a year of free premium access. But analysts caution against attributing it entirely to Airtel users converting. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, meaning users who didn’t actively cancel before the renewal date were charged — so some of the revenue could reflect inertia rather than deliberate choice. Sensor Tower cannot distinguish between those scenarios, nor can it separate former Airtel users from other paying customers.
Michaeli also noted that the enormous visibility from the promotion may have attracted paying users who never participated in the giveaway. “I compared Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to ensure it wasn’t more appetite for AI, and it wasn’t,” he said, but the brand awareness effect could still drive organic conversions.
Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.
India as the proving ground for subsidized AI
Perplexity’s experiment has become a template for other AI companies in India. OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in August 2025, and Google followed with an 18-month free AI Pro subscription for eligible Reliance Jio users. India is the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads, but monetization has been difficult, with price-sensitive consumers and intense competition.
The Airtel deal was the first large-scale test of whether giving away premium AI can build habits that translate into paying customers. With the earliest cohort of Airtel users now past their renewal dates, the data suggests the strategy can at least sustain usage and generate some revenue — but the full answer will only emerge over the coming months as later cohorts reach their renewal deadlines. For now, the evidence points to a more nuanced outcome: the giveaway didn’t create a massive new paying base overnight, but it did turn Perplexity into a major player in India’s AI market, with a user base and revenue trajectory far stronger than before the offer.
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