MUMBAI: The free ride may be ending, but Perplexity’s India story is far from running out of steam. The AI search platform is seeing downloads plunge after Airtel’s year-long free subscription offer ended for new redemptions, yet its revenue and user activity are holding up raising the bigger question of how many free users are willing to become paying customers.
The Airtel partnership, launched in July 2025, gave the telecom operator’s 360 million customers access to a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription at no cost. The annual plan was valued at around $200. New users could claim the offer until 16 January 2026, while each subscriber received access for a year from activation.
The promotion gave Perplexity an immediate jolt in India. Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch showed 5.9 million downloads in July 2025, a 625 per cent increase from the previous month. That was more than the 5.4 million downloads the platform had recorded across the entire first half of 2025.
The surge continued while the offer remained open. Perplexity clocked an estimated 56 million downloads over the seven months in which new users could redeem the Airtel offer, more than nine times the total recorded during the preceding seven months.
Then came the post-promotion reality check. Between February and July 2026, Perplexity recorded just 3.3 million downloads in India, according to Sensor Tower, a drop of more than 90 per cent from the previous six-month period.
But downloads are only half the story. Monthly active users reached around 22 million in October, before falling to nearly 14 million in July. Even that July figure was more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged during the first half of 2025.
The more intriguing movement is happening in revenue. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s Indian in-app purchase and subscription revenue between February and mid-August was about 60 per cent higher than during the period when new users could still access the Airtel offer.
Revenue also picked up as the first batch of free subscriptions began reaching expiry. Between 18 July and 12 August, average daily in-app purchase revenue in India was 9 per cent above the previous 30-day average and 27 per cent higher than the average recorded during the first half of 2026.
That does not, however, mean every rupee can be traced back to an Airtel user opening their wallet. Sensor Tower cannot establish whether the additional revenue came from former Airtel subscribers actively choosing to pay or from customers who had never been part of the promotion. The subscriptions were also set to auto-renew, meaning users who did not cancel could be charged once their free period ended.
A second set of data points in the same direction. Appfigures found that average daily downloads in India jumped from around 11,200 before the Airtel launch to nearly 223,000 during the promotion’s first week. The figure subsequently reached roughly 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October, while downloads for ChatGPT and Claude remained broadly stable during that period.
Appfigures estimates that Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India climbed from around $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December and $156,000 in July 2026. For the first seven months of 2026, estimated Indian revenue reached $878,000, already 16 per cent higher than the company’s total estimated revenue from India for all of 2025.
Still, the Airtel offer cannot be credited for the entire increase. Appfigures cautioned that the visibility generated by the promotion may also have attracted paying customers who never received the free subscription.
That makes Perplexity’s next phase particularly important. The platform has already demonstrated that a large free-access partnership can put an AI product in millions of Indian hands. The tougher trick is turning that reach into recurring revenue once the free pass runs out.
The timing also matters for the wider AI market. OpenAI and Google have similarly pursued free or lower-cost access and distribution partnerships to build their presence in India, making the country an increasingly important testing ground for how AI companies acquire, retain and monetise users.
For Perplexity, the numbers currently tell a mixed but encouraging story: downloads have fallen dramatically, monthly usage remains well above pre-Airtel levels and revenue is rising. The real verdict will come as more of Airtel’s 360 million-customer base reaches the end of its individual free period and users decide whether Perplexity is worth paying for once the complimentary chapter closes.
