Airtel Perplexity Pro: What the Free Year Left

How Airtel’s free Perplexity Pro year worked

On July 17, 2025, Airtel offered all 360 million of its mobile, Wi-Fi, and DTH (direct-to-home TV) customers a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, priced at INR 17,000 a year. Customers redeemed it by logging in to the Airtel Thanks app, and TechCrunch puts its usual value at about $200. Airtel is India’s second-biggest telecom operator, and this was Perplexity’s first partnership with an Indian telecom company.

The press release lists what Pro adds: more daily Pro searches, advanced models such as GPT 4.1 and Claude with the option to pick one, deep research, image generation, file uploads and analysis, and Perplexity Labs. Neither the press release nor TechCrunch’s report says how many customers redeemed it.

New redemptions ended on January 16, 2026. Each year runs from the day a customer activated it, so free access ends on a rolling basis, and the earliest users reached the end in July 2026. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so anyone who did not want a charge had to cancel before the renewal date.

Perplexity downloads jumped, then fell more than 90%

Every figure in this and the next two sections is an estimate from Sensor Tower or Appfigures, two firms that track app downloads and revenue, as shared with TechCrunch. None of them comes from Perplexity.

Sensor Tower estimates 5.9 million Perplexity downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% from the previous month. That single month beat the 5.4 million Perplexity had accumulated across the whole first half of the year. Across the seven months the offer was open to new users, downloads reached 56 million, more than nine times the preceding seven-month period.

Appfigures’ estimates show the same jump in daily terms. Downloads averaged about 11,200 a day in the week before the offer launched. They reached nearly 223,000 a day in its first week and about 305,000 a day between mid-September and mid-October 2025.

Appfigures co-founder and CEO Ariel Michaeli compared Perplexity with ChatGPT and Claude to check that this was not simply more appetite for AI. Downloads of both stayed broadly stable.

Once the window to claim the free subscription closed in January, downloads fell sharply. Sensor Tower estimates 3.3 million downloads in India between February and July 2026, down more than 90% from the preceding six months.

Monthly users fell 37% but stayed far above the baseline

Sensor Tower estimates nearly 14 million monthly active users in July 2026, down 37% from a peak of about 22 million in October 2025. That is still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025. Monthly active users had more than doubled to 8.9 million in July 2025, the launch month, before climbing to the peak.

Perplexity monthly active users in India, Sensor Tower estimates

Estimates reported on August 18, 2026

Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told TechCrunch that a time-limited promotion would naturally bring fewer new adopters once the offer ended, while ongoing usage has remained resilient. He added that Perplexity has “significantly more users” in India than in the six months before the promotion.

In-app revenue rose about 60% as downloads fell

Sensor Tower estimates that Perplexity’s in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August 2026 rose about 60% from the period when the Airtel offer was open to new users. That happened despite the fall in downloads. From around July 18 through August 12, average daily in-app purchase revenue was 9% higher than in the preceding 30 days and 27% above the first-half 2026 average.

Appfigures traces the climb from further back. Its estimate of monthly net mobile revenue in India grew from about $34,000 in January 2025 to $70,000 in December 2025 and $156,000 in July 2026. It puts the first seven months of 2026 at an estimated $878,000, up 16% from all of 2025.

Why auto-renewal blurs the revenue numbers

TechCrunch reads the revenue rise as an early sign that some users may be willing to pay after getting used to the premium service for free. The rise does not confirm that Airtel users themselves are deliberately converting, the report adds. The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, so some of the increase may come from users who did not cancel in time rather than users who chose to pay.

Sensor Tower cannot tell those two groups apart, and it cannot separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers. Michaeli of Appfigures cautioned against crediting all of the growth to Airtel users becoming paying customers. The visibility the promotion created may also have attracted paying users who were never part of the giveaway.

TechCrunch also says the data cannot yet show how many newly acquired users will pay once the free year runs out. Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment, the report says.

OpenAI and Google also offered free plans in India

TechCrunch reports that in August 2025, OpenAI made its lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan free for a year in India. Google followed Perplexity with a deal giving eligible Reliance Jio users its AI Pro subscription free for 18 months. The terms differ: the Jio offer is limited to eligible users, while Perplexity’s covered all Airtel mobile, Wi-Fi, and DTH customers.

TechCrunch says Perplexity’s Airtel deal began months before both. Its users therefore form one of the first large cohorts in India to reach the point where free premium AI becomes a product they may have to pay for.

TechCrunch calls India the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads, but one that remains difficult to monetize, and says AI companies have been willing to trade near-term revenue for users there. It says the test of whether those users pay will play out over the coming months as later cohorts of Airtel users reach their renewal dates.

Each estimate is easiest to judge next to its caveat in the source. To save the full TechCrunch report as Markdown for that comparison, try the tool that converts a URL into Markdown.

Summary

Perplexity’s free year in India left three curves pointing in different directions. TechCrunch reported estimates from Sensor Tower and Appfigures on August 18, 2026. Downloads fell more than 90% after redemptions closed, monthly active users held above five times the level before the deal, and in-app revenue rose about 60%.

Because the free subscriptions were set to auto-renew, the revenue rise does not show how many people chose to pay. OpenAI offered ChatGPT Go free for a year in India, Google offered AI Pro free for 18 months to eligible Reliance Jio users, and TechCrunch says the test will play out as later cohorts reach their renewal dates. For another Sensor Tower view of the AI assistant market, see ChatGPT Market Share Falls Below 50% in 2026.