Perplexity’s Free Airtel Deal Added Millions of Lasting Users in India

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A free-subscription deal between Perplexity and Indian telecom operator Airtel drove 56 million app downloads in seven months and left the AI search company with nearly 14 million monthly active users in India even after the promotion expired, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower.

What the numbers show

Perplexity announced the Airtel partnership in July 2025, offering a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription - normally priced at about $200 - to Airtel’s 360 million customers. The Indian carrier is the country’s second-largest telecom operator. New redemptions closed on January 16, 2026, but because each subscriber retained Pro access for a full year from activation, the earliest users only began losing free access last month and faced automatic charges unless they opted out.

The immediate impact was striking. Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025 alone, a 625% increase from the previous month and more than the 5.4 million downloads accumulated across the entire first half of the year, Sensor Tower data show. That momentum extended well beyond launch month: the platform accumulated 56 million downloads during the seven months the offer was available to new users - more than nine times the total from the preceding seven-month period.

Monthly active users more than doubled to 8.9 million in July 2025 and eventually peaked at approximately 22 million in October. Once the window to claim the free subscription closed in January 2026, downloads collapsed. Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity was downloaded just 3.3 million times in India between February and July 2026, a drop of more than 90% from the preceding six months.

User retention told a different story. Monthly active users stood at nearly 14 million in July 2026, down 37% from the October peak but still more than five times the roughly 2.6 million monthly active users Perplexity averaged in the first half of 2025.

“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.”- Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst, Sensor Tower

Yousef added that Perplexity has “significantly more users” in India than it did in the six months before the promotion began.

Why India became the testing ground

India’s combination of scale and conversion difficulty makes it an unusual market for AI companies. The country has more than a billion internet subscribers, over 700 million smartphone users - making it the world’s second-largest smartphone market after China - and relatively low mobile data costs. That scale has made it a major source of downloads for generative AI services from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, all of which have pursued Indian consumers through lower-cost plans, free-access windows and distribution partnerships.

Translating those users into paying customers has, however, proved considerably harder. India’s price sensitivity is well documented, and the Perplexity-Airtel experiment represents one of the most direct public tests of whether carrier bundling - a strategy that built subscriber bases for music and video streaming services - can work for paid AI products. The approach shifts the cost of customer acquisition from individual marketing spend to a wholesale arrangement with a distribution partner, effectively subsidising access at scale in the hope that a meaningful share of users will pay once the free period lapses.

What the retention figures mean for the model

The early data suggest the strategy produces a durable user base even if it does not maintain peak engagement. Losing 37% of peak monthly active users after the free tier expired is a significant contraction, but the base that remains - nearly 14 million users in July - represents a structural gain that would have been difficult and expensive to achieve through conventional advertising alone.

The critical question that the available data do not yet answer is conversion to paid subscriptions. Sensor Tower’s figures track downloads and monthly active users but do not reveal how many of those 14 million remaining users have opted into paid Pro plans or what revenue Perplexity is generating from the Indian market following the Airtel window. That figure will ultimately determine whether the roughly $200-per-user subsidy delivered by the deal translates into a viable business.

What the experiment does confirm is that bundling with a major carrier can move an AI product from a niche tool to a mass-market application in one of the world’s largest consumer markets within months. Whether mass-market reach in India can become mass-market revenue remains the open question every AI company targeting the country is now watching Perplexity answer.

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