Perplexity's Free India Giveaway Created Millions of Users — and Real Revenue
The Airtel bundling experiment is the first real test of whether giving premium AI away can produce lasting users and paying customers after the offer ends
Published: 2026-08-23 Category: Quick Take Sources: TechCrunch — Perplexity's free AI offer left it with millions more users in India
What Happened
Perplexity spent the past year running one of the biggest AI growth experiments in the world: giving its premium service free to customers of Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator, with a 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription normally worth about $200. Now that the earliest subscriptions are expiring, the results are coming in — and they offer an early verdict on whether bundling paid AI services can create durable users and revenue after the giveaway ends.
The Numbers
The impact was immediate. Perplexity saw 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% month-over-month and more than the 5.4 million it had accumulated in the entire first half of the year. Across the seven months the offer was open to new users, it recorded 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.
The giveaway's end was predictable: once the claim window closed in January, downloads fell sharply, down more than 90% in the February–July period. But the retained users didn't vanish. MAUs stood near 14 million in July — down 37% from the peak, yet still five times the ~2.6 million average of the first half of 2025.
The Surprise: Revenue
The most striking finding is that Perplexity's drop in downloads has not come with a drop in spending. Sensor Tower estimates in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India between February and mid-August rose about 60% versus the period when the Airtel offer was available — even as downloads cratered. And that trend has held as the earliest Airtel subscribers began losing free access: from roughly July 18 through August 12, average daily in-app revenue was 9% higher than the preceding 30 days and 27% above the first-half-2026 average.
That's a meaningful counter to the usual skepticism that subsidized AI scale never converts. As Sensor Tower analyst Abe Yousef put it, "While the time-sensitive nature of this promotion would naturally lead to a decline in adoption after the offer period, ongoing usage has remained resilient." For AI companies chasing scale in price-sensitive markets like India, it's a signal that a giveaway can seed both habit and paying behavior — if the product is good enough to stick.
Source: TechCrunch (Jagmeet Singh, August 18, 2026)