Editorial illustration for Perplexity's Free AI Offer Drew Millions of New Users in India
Perplexity Free Offer Attracts Millions in India
Perplexity's biggest bet on growth in India is starting to show its cards. In July 2025, the AI search company teamed up with Airtel, the country's second largest telecom carrier, to hand out free 12-month subscriptions to Perplexity Pro, a product normally priced around $200 a year, to Airtel's 360 million customers. The offer stopped taking new sign-ups on January 16, and because each subscription ran for a full year from activation, the first wave of free users has now started hitting the point where they either pay up or walk away.
The scale of the giveaway made it one of the largest consumer AI promotions run in India to date, and the early numbers show just how fast it moved. Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch shows download spikes and sustained user growth that outpaced anything Perplexity had seen before the Airtel deal. Now that renewals are kicking in, the company faces the harder question: how many of those millions of new users are willing to keep paying once the free ride ends.
Perplexity spent the past year running one of the biggest AI growth experiments, giving its premium service away to customers of Indian telecom giant Airtel. Now, as the earliest of those free subscriptions expire, the results are starting to emerge, offering an early test of whether bundling paid AI services can create lasting users and revenue after the giveaway ends.
Why this matters
Airtel's deal with Perplexity is the clearest data point yet on whether giving away premium AI actually builds a paying business, and the early signal is mixed at best. Millions of Indian users claimed free Perplexity Pro, but the real test starts now that the earliest 12-month subscriptions have expired. For founders eyeing similar telecom or hardware bundling deals, the lesson isn't "free users convert," it's "free users show up." What happens after January, when the free window closed, will tell us whether Perplexity built habit or just borrowed attention.
Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are all running versions of this same India playbook, betting that cheap or free access now buys market share before monetization later. That bet assumes users stick around once the free plan disappears, and Airtel's numbers are the first real evidence either way. We'd treat this as a warning against reading subscriber counts as revenue signals.
Growth-by-giveaway looks impressive in a press release. Whether it survives contact with a billing screen is the actual story, and we're watching for the retention numbers, not the sign-up numbers.
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Common Questions Answered
What was Perplexity's partnership deal with Airtel in India?
In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel, India's second largest telecom carrier, to offer free 12-month subscriptions to Perplexity Pro to Airtel's 360 million customers. Perplexity Pro normally costs around $200 per year, making this a significant free offer that stopped accepting new sign-ups on January 16, 2026.
Why does Perplexity's Airtel bundling deal matter for the AI industry?
The Airtel partnership represents one of the biggest AI growth experiments and provides the clearest data point yet on whether giving away premium AI services actually builds a sustainable paying business. The results from this deal will serve as a key indicator for other founders considering similar telecom or hardware bundling strategies for their AI products.
What are the early signals from Perplexity's free subscription expiration in India?
As the earliest 12-month free subscriptions began expiring after January 2026, the results showed mixed signals at best for converting free users to paying customers. While millions of Indian users claimed the free Perplexity Pro offer, the real test of whether those users would convert to paid subscriptions was just beginning.
What is the key lesson for founders from Perplexity's Airtel bundling experiment?
The primary lesson emerging from this experiment is that 'free users show up' rather than the assumption that 'free users convert' to paying customers. The success of bundling deals appears to depend more on what happens after the free period ends rather than simply attracting large numbers of free users initially.
Further Reading
- Papers with Code - Latest NLP Research - Papers with Code
- Hugging Face Daily Papers - Hugging Face
- ArXiv CS.CL (Computation and Language) - ArXiv
