Perplexity’s partnership with Airtel delivered 5.9 million app downloads in India during July 2025, a figure that eclipsed the total volume accumulated throughout the entire first half of that year.
The agreement, announced in July 2025, granted the carrier’s 360 million customers a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro. The value of this service is typically around $200. Redemptions ceased on January 16, but users retained access for a full year from their activation date. Consequently, the earliest subscribers reached the end of their free period last month and faced the decision of whether to opt out of auto-renewal.
The download surge
Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads across the seven months the offer remained available to new users. Sensor Tower estimates this was more than nine times the volume of 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 remains a massive market for global technology due to its population of over a billion internet subscribers and low mobile data costs. The country holds the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China, with over 700 million users. However, converting this scale into revenue has proved difficult for AI firms willing to subsidise access.
Companies such as Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have pursued similar strategies, offering India-specific plans and distribution partnerships to eventually secure paying customers.
Revenue without the downloads
Once the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed in January, Perplexity’s download numbers fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimates the app was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July, a drop of more than 90% from the previous six months.
Despite this decline in new users, spending did not follow suit. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose by about 60% compared to the period when the Airtel offer was active.
This trend continued as the earliest Airtel subscribers lost their free access. From around July 18 through August 12, Perplexity’s 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.
Analysts note this suggests some users are willing to pay after experiencing the premium service for free. However, the data cannot confirm that Airtel users are the ones converting. The subscriptions required users to cancel manually before the renewal date to avoid charges. It is possible the revenue increase reflects users who failed to cancel rather than those who actively chose to pay. Sensor Tower cannot distinguish between these scenarios.
Appfigures analysis
Appfigures, another app intelligence firm, found the Airtel deal significantly altered Perplexity’s trajectory in India. The data indicates the initial growth was specific to Perplexity rather than a general increase in appetite for AI apps.
“I compared Perplexity’s downloads to ChatGPT and Claude to ensure it wasn’t more appetite for AI, and it wasn’t,” Ariel Michaeli, co-founder and CEO of Appfigures, told TechCrunch.
In the week before the Airtel offer launched, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 downloads a day in India. That figure jumped twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day during the first week of the launch and continued climbing to an average of about 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October. Downloads for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remained broadly stable during this time.
Appfigures also sees signs that Perplexity emerged from the giveaway with a larger business in India. 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. The company generated an estimated $878,000 in India in the first seven months of 2026, up 16% from the entire year of 2025.
Michaeli cautioned against attributing all that growth to Airtel users becoming paying customers. The enormous visibility from the promotion may have also attracted paying users who were never part of the giveaway.
Broader context
Perplexity’s experiment has become part of a wider wager by AI companies in India. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in the country. Google subsequently followed Perplexity with a deal to offer its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users.
This makes Perplexity an early test of whether the strategy can work. Its Airtel deal began months before similar moves by OpenAI and Google. Perplexity users are among the first large cohort in India to reach the point where free premium AI turns into a product they may have to pay for.
India has already emerged as the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads but remains difficult to monetise. AI companies have been willing to trade near-term revenue for users in this price-conscious market, striving to eventually turn that scale and habit into paying customers.
That said, the data cannot yet show how many of Perplexity’s newly acquired users will willingly pay once their free year runs out. That test will play out over the coming months as later cohorts of Airtel users reach their renewal dates.
Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.
What it means
The Airtel deal demonstrates that a massive influx of users can convert into revenue even after the promotional period ends, provided the product retains value. However, the data is not yet clear on whether the new users are paying because they prefer the service or simply because they forgot to cancel their auto-renewal. The true test of user loyalty remains to be seen as more subscribers face the renewal deadline.
