Perplexity’s year-long bet on free access in India is starting to show its return. The AI search company’s in-app revenue in the country rose roughly 60% in the months after its giveaway with telecom operator Airtel closed to new users, according to estimates from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, even as its download numbers collapsed.
The offer itself is documented on the record. In July 2025, Airtel announced it would give a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, priced at ₹17,000 (about $200) a year, free to all 360 million of its customers across mobile, Wi-Fi, and DTH. Perplexity’s own promotion terms confirm the mechanics: new redemptions ended on January 16, 2026, the offer required a credit card to activate, and subscribers kept Pro for a full year from the moment they claimed it.
That last detail is what makes the current moment the real test. Because the free year ran from each user’s activation date, the earliest cohort only began losing complimentary access around July 2026: the first large group to reach the point where free premium AI becomes something they either pay for or lose.
The Download Boom Reversed, but the Users Stayed
The scale of the giveaway’s pull is best captured in the numbers Sensor Tower shared with TechCrunch. Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the prior month and more than the 5.4 million it had accumulated across the entire first half of the year. Over the seven months the offer remained open to new users, downloads reached 56 million, more than nine times the preceding seven-month stretch. Monthly active users climbed past 8.9 million in July and peaked at roughly 22 million in October 2025.
Once the redemption window closed in January 2026, the top of the funnel shut off. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded just 3.3 million times in India between February and July 2026, a drop of more than 90% from the prior six months.
The acquired base, though, did not drain away at the same rate. Monthly active users stood near 14 million in July 2026 — down 37% from the October peak, but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025, before the Airtel deal existed. “Ongoing usage has remained resilient,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told TechCrunch, adding that Perplexity now has significantly more users in India than it did in the six months before the promotion.
The more telling figure is the money. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity’s combined in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August 2026 rose about 60% compared with the period when the Airtel offer was still open to new users. The trend held even as the earliest free subscribers hit their renewal dates: from around July 18 through August 12, 2026, average daily in-app revenue ran 9% above the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026.
A Second Dataset Confirms the Shape
An independent estimate from Appfigures, a rival app intelligence firm, points the same direction. Its data shows Perplexity averaging about 11,200 downloads a day in India in the week before the Airtel launch, jumping twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day in the first week of the offer, and peaking around 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October 2025. Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli told TechCrunch he benchmarked against ChatGPT and Claude to rule out a general surge in AI-app demand. Downloads of both stayed broadly stable over the same window, indicating the spike was specific to the Airtel deal rather than a rising tide.
On revenue, Appfigures estimates Perplexity’s monthly net mobile figure in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December, reaching $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 Auto-Renewal Fine Print Obscures
The revenue rise comes with a caveat built into the promotion’s own design. Perplexity’s terms page shows the free subscriptions required a credit card at redemption, with no charges applied during the promotional period; the page does not specify what billing occurs once the free year ends. Some of the measured revenue increase may therefore reflect subscribers who simply did not cancel in time rather than customers making an active decision to pay.
Neither Sensor Tower nor Appfigures can distinguish between those two behaviors, nor separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers. Michaeli cautioned against reading all of the growth as giveaway users converting, noting that the promotion’s enormous visibility may also have attracted paying users who were never part of the Airtel offer at all.
The cleaner read on deliberate conversion arrives over the coming months, as later cohorts of Airtel users — those who claimed the offer closer to the January 16, 2026 cutoff — reach their own renewal dates and face the same pay-or-cancel decision.
Perplexity’s experiment was the opening move in a wider race for India’s AI users. OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in the country in August 2025, and Google followed with a deal bundling its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users. Perplexity, having started months earlier, is simply the first of the three to reach the point where the free period ends and the renewal decision becomes real.
