Perplexity has spent the last year running one of the most ambitious experiments in AI growth, handing out free premium access to customers of Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom provider. Now that the earliest free subscriptions are starting to lapse, the early results are coming into focus—offering a first real look at whether bundling paid AI services with telecom plans can create lasting users and revenue once the giveaway ends.

In July 2025, Perplexity teamed up with Airtel to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription—normally priced around $200—to the carrier’s 360 million subscribers. New redemptions were closed off on January 16. But since each user’s free year began at the moment they activated it, the first wave of subscribers hit the end of their free access last month, and those who didn’t want to continue had to opt out of auto-renewal to avoid being charged.

The giveaway had an immediate and dramatic impact. Perplexity saw 5 million downloads in India during the month the offer launched, a 625% jump from the previous month and more than the 5.4 million downloads the app had accumulated in the entire first half of the year. That momentum didn’t fade quickly. According to Sensor Tower, Perplexity recorded 56 million downloads during the seven months the offer was open to new users—more than nine times the preceding seven-month period. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and eventually peaked at 22 million in October.

India has long been a massive download market for global tech companies, driven by its enormous population, over a billion internet subscribers, and some of the cheapest mobile data in the world. It’s the second-largest smartphone market globally, with more than 700 million devices, and has become a key source of users for generative AI services. But turning that scale into revenue has proven far more difficult. For AI companies willing to subsidize access in exchange for growth, India’s market dynamics make it an appealing testing ground. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others have increasingly targeted Indian consumers with lower-cost, India-specific plans, free access, and distribution partnerships—all in hopes of eventually converting them into paying customers.

Once the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed in January, however, Perplexity’s downloads fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimates the app was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July—down more than 90% from the previous six months. But the users Perplexity had acquired didn’t vanish as quickly. Monthly active users, which peaked around 22 million in October, stood at nearly 14 million in July—down 37% from the high but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025. Perplexity’s user base in India remains “significantly larger” than it was before the promotion, according to Sensor Tower.

More striking is that the drop in downloads hasn’t been matched by a decline in spending. Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% compared to the period when the Airtel offer was still available to new users—even as downloads declined. That trend has held even as the earliest Airtel subscribers began losing their free Pro access. From roughly July 18 through August 12, Perplexity’s average daily in-app purchase revenue in India was 9% higher than the preceding 30 days and 27% above the average for the first half of 2026.

That uptick offers an early signal that some users may be willing to pay after getting comfortable with the premium service for free. But it doesn’t confirm that Airtel users themselves are deliberately converting. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, meaning users who didn’t want to continue had to cancel before the renewal date to avoid being charged. That means some of the revenue increase could reflect users who simply didn’t cancel in time rather than those who actively chose to pay. Sensor Tower can’t distinguish between those scenarios, nor can it separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers.

Another app intelligence firm, Appfigures, also found that the Airtel deal dramatically shifted Perplexity’s trajectory in India. In the week before the offer launched, Perplexity averaged about 11,200 downloads a day in India. That jumped twentyfold to nearly 223,000 a day during the first week of the launch and kept climbing, reaching an average of about 305,000 daily downloads between mid-September and mid-October. By comparison, downloads of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remained broadly stable.

Appfigures also sees signs that Perplexity came out of the giveaway with a larger business in India, even after the promotional download surge faded. Perplexity’s 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 during the first seven months of 2026—up 16% from all of 2025.

Still, analysts caution against attributing all of that growth to Airtel users becoming paying subscribers. The massive visibility generated by the promotion may also have attracted paying users who were never part of the giveaway. Perplexity’s experiment has since become part of a broader bet by AI companies in India. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in the country. Google followed Perplexity with a deal offering its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users.

That positions Perplexity as an early test case for whether this strategy can work. Its Airtel deal began months before OpenAI and Google made similar moves, which means Perplexity users are among the first large group in India to reach the point where free premium AI turns into something they may have to pay for. India has already become the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads, but it remains difficult to monetize. AI companies have been willing to trade near-term revenue for users in this price-conscious market, hoping to eventually turn scale and habit into paying customers.

That said, the data can’t yet show how many of Perplexity’s newly acquired users will willingly pay once their free year runs out. That test will unfold over the coming months as later cohorts of Airtel users hit their renewal dates. Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.