A giveaway becomes a real-world conversion test

Perplexity’s year-long free subscription deal with Airtel has become one of the clearest early tests of whether premium AI services can use telecom bundling to create lasting users in India. In July 2025, the company partnered with Airtel, India’s second-largest carrier, to offer a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription to Airtel’s 360 million customers. The subscription normally costs about $200.

New redemptions ended on January 16, but users kept Pro access for a year from activation. That means the first cohort has only recently started reaching the point where free access turns into a potential paid subscription.

The early signal is mixed but important: downloads collapsed after the promotion window closed, yet spending did not. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India from February to mid-August rose about 60% compared with the period when the Airtel offer was still available to new users.

The scale effect was immediate

The Airtel distribution channel produced a dramatic surge. Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the previous month. That single month exceeded the 5.4 million downloads the app had accumulated in India during the entire first half of 2025.

During the seven months when the offer was available to new users, Perplexity generated about 56 million downloads in India, more than nine times the prior seven-month period, according to Sensor Tower. Monthly active users, a measure of how many people actually use an app in a month, more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and peaked at about 22 million in October.

Key figures from the reported data include:

• July 2025 downloads in India: 5.9 million;
• Downloads during the seven-month redemption window: about 56 million;
• Peak monthly active users: about 22 million in October;
• July 2026 monthly active users: nearly 14 million;
• February to July 2026 downloads: 3.3 million, down more than 90% from the preceding six months.

That decline shows the promotional spike was not permanent. But the user base did not return to its pre-deal level. July 2026 monthly active users were still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025.

Why India matters for AI subscriptions

India is a natural testing ground for AI companies that want scale before revenue. The country has more than a billion internet subscribers, more than 700 million smartphone users, and relatively inexpensive mobile data. It is also the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China.

For generative AI services — tools that create text, code, images, or other outputs from user prompts — India has already become a major source of app downloads. The harder question is monetization. Large user numbers do not automatically translate into recurring subscription revenue, especially in a price-sensitive market.

That is why Perplexity’s experiment is being watched closely. The original report notes that Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others have been pursuing Indian consumers with India-specific lower-cost plans, free access, and distribution partnerships. Perplexity’s Airtel deal is now entering the stage that matters most: what happens after free premium access begins to expire.

Revenue growth has caveats

The revenue signal is encouraging, but it does not prove that Airtel users are actively choosing to pay after the giveaway. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so users had to cancel before renewal to avoid being charged. Some of the spending increase could therefore come from users who did not cancel in time.

Sensor Tower cannot separate former Airtel users from other paying customers, nor can it distinguish active conversion from automatic renewal. Appfigures, another app intelligence firm, also found that the Airtel deal changed Perplexity’s trajectory in India.

Appfigures’ download data reinforces that the surge was specific to Perplexity rather than a broad AI-app wave. Before the Airtel offer, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 downloads a day in India. In the first week of the offer, that rose roughly twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day, then climbed to about 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October. ChatGPT and Claude downloads remained broadly stable over the comparison period.

Appfigures also estimated that Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India rose from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and $156,000 in July 2026.

What the experiment suggests

Perplexity’s Airtel deal shows that AI subscriptions bundled through telecom partners can create rapid distribution and leave behind a much larger active user base. It also suggests that free premium access may help some users build habits around paid AI tools.

But the decisive test is still ahead. As later Airtel cohorts reach their renewal dates, the market will get a clearer view of how many users intentionally remain paying customers. For AI companies in India, the playbook of free access, local pricing, and distribution partnerships is likely to continue. The harder task will be turning temporary scale into durable revenue.