Perplexity’s yearlong experiment giving away its premium service to Airtel customers in India produced a massive surge in users and downloads, but the numbers have since cooled sharply, according to new data from app intelligence firms Sensor Tower and Appfigures. The promotion, which began in mid-2025, let Airtel subscribers claim a free year of Perplexity’s paid tier. As the earliest subscriptions expire, the results offer an early test of whether such bundles can create lasting revenue once the giveaway ends.
The immediate impact was dramatic. Perplexity saw 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the prior month and more than the 5.4 million downloads it had recorded in the entire first half of that year, per Sensor Tower. Over the seven months the offer was open to new users, Perplexity logged 56 million downloads, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period. Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July and peaked at 22 million in October.
After the window to claim the free Airtel subscription closed in January, downloads fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded 3.3 million times in India between February and July, down more than 90% from the prior six months. Monthly active users stood at nearly 14 million in July, 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. Sensor Tower senior insights analyst Abe Yousef said ongoing usage remained resilient and that Perplexity has significantly more users in India than before the promotion.
Strikingly, the drop in downloads did not accompany a decline in spending. Sensor Tower estimated Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% from the period when the Airtel offer was available, despite lower download numbers. Appfigures, which also tracked the deal, found the growth was specific to Perplexity rather than a broader appetite for AI apps. Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli said downloads for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remained broadly stable over the same period, while Perplexity’s daily downloads jumped from about 11,200 before the offer to nearly 223,000 in its first week and about 305,000 between mid-September and mid-October.
Appfigures also estimated Perplexity’s monthly net mobile revenue in India 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 all of 2025. Michaeli cautioned that the promotion’s enormous visibility may have also attracted paying users who never participated in the giveaway, so not all growth can be attributed to Airtel subscribers converting.
Perplexity’s experiment has become part of a broader push by AI companies into India, a price-conscious market that leads the world in generative AI app downloads but remains hard to monetize. In August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in India, and Google followed with a deal offering its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users. Perplexity’s Airtel deal began months before those moves, making its users among the first large cohort in India to reach the point where free premium AI becomes a product they may have to pay for. The data so far cannot show how many will willingly pay once their free year runs out, a test that will play out over the coming months as later Airtel user cohorts hit their renewal dates.
